Skilled Worker Visa: How to Track Your Absences for ILR
A practical guide for Skilled Worker visa holders on tracking days outside the UK to ensure eligibility for Indefinite Leave to Remain.
The Skilled Worker visa (formerly Tier 2 General) is one of the most common routes to settlement in the UK. If you’re on this visa and planning to apply for ILR after 5 years, keeping track of your time outside the country is essential.
Qualifying period for Skilled Worker visa holders
To be eligible for ILR on the Skilled Worker route, you need to have completed a continuous period of 5 years of lawful residence in the UK. During this time, your absences must stay within the allowed limits.
What counts as an absence?
Any day you spend outside the UK counts as a day of absence. This includes:
- Holidays — both short breaks and longer vacations
- Business trips — even if required by your UK employer
- Family visits — trips home to see family
- Transit days — the day you depart and the day you arrive back
It doesn’t matter why you left the UK. All days outside the country are counted the same way.
Practical tips for tracking
1. Start tracking from day one
Don’t wait until your ILR application is approaching. Begin recording your trips as soon as you arrive in the UK on your Skilled Worker visa. It’s much easier to log trips in real time than to reconstruct your travel history years later.
2. Plan your travel budget wisely
With 180 days per rolling 12-month period, you have roughly 15 days per month of travel allowance. But be careful — trips tend to cluster around holidays and summer, so your actual distribution may be uneven.
A good rule of thumb: try to keep each year’s absences well under 150 days to give yourself a safety margin.
3. Watch out for remote working abroad
Working remotely from another country still counts as being absent from the UK. Even if you’re doing your normal job for your UK employer, every day outside the UK is a day of absence for ILR purposes.
What if your employer requires travel?
Many Skilled Worker visa holders travel frequently for business. While the Home Office doesn’t treat business travel any differently from personal travel in terms of counting days, extensive business travel on behalf of a UK employer may be viewed favourably if you need to request discretion for slightly exceeding the limits.
However, it’s always better to stay within the limits than to rely on discretion.
Using awayfrom.uk to stay on track
awayfrom.uk is designed specifically for people on UK work visas. When you create an account and select the Skilled Worker route, the app applies the correct absence rules and shows you:
- How many days you’ve been away in each rolling 12-month period
- Your total absences across the qualifying period
- How many days you have remaining before hitting any limit
It’s completely free to use and works on any device.