Does an official endorsement success rate exist?
No. As of 6 July 2026, there is no official, published figure for how many Digital Technology endorsement applications are approved or refused. The Home Office and the endorsing body do not publish a route-wide approval rate that anyone outside the process can check. This is the single most important fact on this page, and it is why we built the page at all.
That absence is not a gap we can fill with a better guess. It means the raw material for a trustworthy statistic — a published count of applications made and decisions given — is simply not in the public domain. You cannot compute a rate without a denominator, and there is no published denominator.
Fees and timelines are current at 6 July 2026 per GOV.UK — Global Talent (Digital Technology). No approval-rate statistic is published by any official source. We re-verify this regularly.
Why is there no official approval rate?
There is no official approval rate because no public dataset records the outcome of each endorsement application in a way that could be aggregated. Immigration statistics that the Home Office does publish are grouped and lagged; they are not a live, itemised register of Digital Technology endorsement decisions. So even a diligent analyst, working only from public sources, cannot produce a defensible route-wide percentage.
This matters because the whole information ecosystem around this visa is unusually noisy. Forum threads, agency blog posts and social media clips routinely present a percentage as though it were established fact. When you trace those numbers back, they dissolve — a screenshot of one cohort, a figure repeated until it sounded official, or an estimate that was never sourced at all. The honest position is the uncomfortable one: nobody, including us, can hand you a verified route-wide success rate.
Should I distrust an adviser who quotes a precise success rate?
Yes — treat it as a warning sign. If an adviser tells you the Digital Technology route has a precise approval rate and presents that as an official or industry-wide figure, they are describing something that cannot be verified from any public source. That does not automatically make them dishonest, but it does mean they are overstating certainty about the one thing nobody can measure — and that is exactly the wrong instinct to want in the person handling your evidence.
A useful test when you are choosing help: ask where a quoted percentage comes from. A trustworthy answer names the population, the sample size and the counting method, and readily admits that no official route-wide rate exists. An evasive answer, or a confident round number with no source, tells you how the rest of the engagement will go.
What actually is known, then?
Plenty is known — it is just the costs and timelines rather than the odds. These figures are published on GOV.UK and are genuinely checkable. The table below is current at 6 July 2026; Home Office fees typically change each April, so we re-verify it regularly and you should re-check before you apply.
| Item | What is known | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Endorsement fee | £561 | Published |
| Visa fee | £205 | Published |
| Combined Home Office fee | £766 | Published |
| Immigration Health Surcharge | £1,035 / yr | Published (usually, per person) |
| Endorsement decision time | 5–8 weeks | Published (usual) |
| Evidence limit | 10 documents | Published (each up to 3 sides of A4) |
| Recommendation letters | 3 letters | Published (outside the 10-document count) |
| Criteria required | Mandatory + 2 of 4 | Published |
| Settlement — as a leader | 3 years | Published |
| Settlement — as a potential leader | 5 years | Published |
| Route-wide approval rate | Not published | Does not exist publicly |
Source: GOV.UK — Global Talent (Digital Technology). Figures current at 6 July 2026; we re-verify this regularly, and you should re-check before applying.
Two process facts are also worth knowing, because stale guides get them wrong. Since 4 August 2025, the separate Tech Nation application form has been withdrawn — applicants complete a single GOV.UK Stage 1 endorsement form, and Tech Nation remains the endorsing body. And an endorsement refusal carries no statutory appeal; the only remedy is a free, non-statutory endorsement review, which must be requested within 28 days and considers process errors only, with no new evidence permitted.
What is not known — and cannot be quoted honestly?
The following cannot be stated as verified fact by anyone, us included, because no public data supports them:
- A route-wide endorsement approval or refusal percentage. There is no published register to compute it from.
- Approval rates broken down by role, seniority or country. If the overall number is not published, no reliable sub-breakdown of it can be either.
- A precise "your profile has an X% chance" figure. No dataset exists that would license a personal probability of that kind.
- Any future fee, rule or timeline stated as already fixed. Where change is possible — fees usually move each April, and settlement periods could be affected by wider policy — we say "as of 6 July 2026" and re-verify rather than predict.
What the community and advisers can offer instead is honest: recurring patterns in why applications are not endorsed — referees who are not senior enough or not from product-led technology companies, recognition that exists only inside the applicant's own employer, achievements described at team level without individual attribution, and optional-criteria evidence rejected on technicalities. These are patterns reported by applicants and advisers, not statistics, and we are careful never to dress them up as numbers.
What about firms that quote their own success rate?
A firm's own figure describes that firm's own clients, not the route as a whole. It depends entirely on who the firm chooses to work with, how it defines a "success", and how it counts the cases that never reached a decision. A consultancy that only takes on strong profiles will naturally report a high number; that says something about its selection, not about your odds on the route generally.
We are in this category too, so we hold ourselves to the same test. Where we publish our own track record, we present it as a described sample with a plain disclaimer — a claim about our clients, not a law of the route. We would rather you read every such number that way, including ours, than treat any of them as an official approval rate. Honesty about the limits of a figure is, in this market, the differentiator.
Want a real read on your own profile — not a made-up percentage?
The £200 Fit Assessment scores your evidence against the criteria and tells you honestly where the gaps are, with a 45-minute walkthrough. No invented statistics; just a diagnosis of your case.
How does Endorsa talk about odds?
We talk about odds the only honest way available: by being specific about your evidence rather than vague about a population. Because no route-wide rate exists, we do not pretend one does. Instead of a percentage, the £200 Fit Assessment gives you a component-by-component read of your case — the mandatory criterion, each optional criterion, your letters and your documentation — and shows exactly where a refusal risk sits. That is a diagnosis you can act on, not a number you cannot check.
Where you see reassurance figures elsewhere on this site, they carry our standard disclaimer for the same reason set out above: they describe our own experience, not the route. If a page ever appears to state a hard approval rate as fact, treat that as an error and tell us — this page is the firm's position, and its position is that the honest number is "not published".
Frequently asked questions
No. As of 6 July 2026, there is no official, published endorsement approval or refusal rate for the Digital Technology route. No public register exists against which any headline success-rate figure could be tested. Anyone quoting a precise route-wide percentage is quoting something that cannot be verified from a public source. We re-verify this regularly.
Because there is no published dataset that would let anyone calculate a route-wide endorsement approval rate. A precise percentage presented as an official figure is, at best, a private sample described as if it were the whole population — and at worst simply invented. An adviser willing to overstate certainty about numbers is the wrong adviser to trust with your evidence.
The fees and timelines are published on GOV.UK and are knowable. As of 6 July 2026: the endorsement fee is £561 and the visa fee is £205 (£766 combined); the Immigration Health Surcharge is usually £1,035 per year per person; the endorsement decision usually takes 5 to 8 weeks; and settlement follows after 3 years as a leader or 5 years as a potential leader. We re-verify these regularly.
A firm's own figure describes that firm's own clients, not the route as a whole, and it depends entirely on how the firm selects who it works with and how it counts outcomes. It is a private statistic, not an official one. We publish ours with a disclaimer for exactly this reason, and we would encourage you to read every such number as a claim about a sample, not a law of the route.
The GOV.UK Global Talent (Digital Technology) guidance is the authoritative source for fees, timelines, evidence limits and the settlement periods. Home Office fees typically change each April, so re-check before you apply. This page is re-verified against GOV.UK on a regular schedule; it was last verified on 6 July 2026.
Related reading: the full cost breakdown, processing time, what changed in 2025/26, success rate & rejection patterns, and every applicant pain point — start here.
Last verified: 6 July 2026. All figures current at 6 July 2026 — always verify on GOV.UK. We re-verify this page regularly.