The Comprehensive Guide to UK Spouse Visas
When Everything Depends on Getting It Right
Applying for a UK spouse visa is one of the highest-stakes administrative processes you’ll ever face. Get it right, and you build your life together in the UK. Get it wrong, and you face months of separation, thousands in reapplication fees, and the anxiety of not knowing if you’ll be together.
The Home Office refuses around 30% of spouse visa applications. Most refusals aren’t because couples don’t genuinely qualify—they’re because applications fail to present qualifying evidence in the precise way the rules require.
This guide explains what the Home Office is looking for, where applications typically go wrong, and why the technical precision required makes professional review worth serious consideration.
The Five Requirements You Must Meet
Every spouse visa application must satisfy five core requirements. Missing any one of them means refusal.
1. Genuine and Subsisting Relationship. You must prove your marriage or civil partnership is genuine and that you’re in a real, continuing relationship—not one entered primarily for immigration purposes. The Home Office assesses this through documentary evidence and, sometimes, interviews. What constitutes “enough” evidence depends entirely on your circumstances: how you met, how long you’ve been together, how much time you’ve spent in the same country.
2. Financial Requirement. Your sponsoring partner must demonstrate a minimum income of £29,000 per year, evidenced in specific ways depending on whether they’re employed, self-employed, or relying on other income sources. This is where more applications fail than anywhere else—not because couples don’t earn enough, but because the evidence doesn’t meet the technical specifications.
3. English Language. The applicant must prove English language ability, either through a recognised test, a degree taught in English, or nationality of a majority English-speaking country.
4. Adequate Accommodation. You must show you have somewhere to live in the UK that isn’t overcrowded by the standards set out in the Housing Act. This rarely causes refusals but requires proper evidence.
5. Immigration Status of Sponsor. Your UK-based partner must be a British citizen, hold settled status (indefinite leave to remain), or have refugee leave or humanitarian protection.
The Financial Requirement: Where Most Applications Fail
The £29,000 minimum income requirement sounds straightforward. Proving it to the Home Office’s satisfaction is not.
If your sponsor is employed, they must have earned at least £29,000 in the six months before the application date, paid by the same employer (or employers, with no gaps). They need payslips for every month, bank statements showing every payment landing, and an employer letter confirming specific details in specific formats. A missing payslip, a gap between jobs, a bank statement that doesn’t quite match the payslip dates—any of these can result in refusal.
Self-employment is harder. The rules require evidence of the last full financial year, calculated in particular ways, evidenced through particular documents. What counts as qualifying income, what deductions apply, and how the Home Office interprets your accounts differs from how your accountant might present things.
Cash savings can make up income shortfalls, but only savings held for at least six months, evidenced in particular ways, calculated using a specific formula. Getting this wrong is easy; getting it right requires understanding exactly what the rules require.
The financial requirement exists to ensure couples can support themselves without recourse to public funds. The way it’s evidenced exists to create a paper trail the Home Office can verify quickly. These are different objectives, and meeting the first doesn’t guarantee you’ve met the second.
Relationship Evidence: Quality Over Quantity
“Genuine and subsisting relationship” is the legal test, but what does it mean in practice?
The Home Office wants to see that your relationship exists outside the immigration application—that you have a shared life, regular contact, and the kind of documentary footprint a genuine couple would have. This typically includes communication records, photographs together, evidence of visits, joint financial commitments, and statements from family and friends who know you as a couple.
What you need depends on what you have. A couple who’ve lived together for years in another country before applying has different evidence from a couple who met online and married after a few visits. Neither is automatically stronger—but each requires a different approach to presenting the relationship convincingly.
Common anxieties include: “We haven’t been together very long.” “We don’t have many photos.” “My family doesn’t approve so we can’t get supporting letters.” “We’re both private people who don’t post on social media.”
None of these are fatal. But each requires you to think carefully about what evidence you do have and how to present it as a coherent picture of a genuine relationship.
The danger is either over-submitting (hundreds of photos, years of messages, overwhelming the caseworker) or under-submitting (assuming the marriage certificate speaks for itself). What works is a curated, well-organised bundle that tells the story of your relationship in a way that’s easy to assess.
The Application Process: What to Expect
Spouse visa applications are made online, with documents uploaded digitally. After submission, the applicant attends a biometrics appointment at a visa application centre in their country. Decision times vary by country and demand—typically between 8 and 24 weeks, though complex cases take longer.
If approved, the visa is initially granted for 33 months. After this period, you apply to extend for a further 30 months. After five years total, you become eligible for indefinite leave to remain—settlement in the UK.
The application fee is currently £1,846, plus an immigration health surcharge of £1,035 per year of visa granted (approximately £2,850 for the initial 33-month visa). Adding the extension and settlement applications, the total cost from first application to settlement exceeds £10,000 in fees alone.
These are not trivial sums. A refused application means paying again—and waiting again—while living apart.
Where Applications Go Wrong
Refusals cluster around predictable problems: financial evidence that doesn’t quite add up or isn’t presented correctly; relationship evidence that’s thin, disorganised, or fails to address obvious questions a caseworker might have; English language certificates that don’t meet the specification; applications that misunderstand the rules or miss requirements entirely.
The Home Office doesn’t give you the benefit of the doubt. They assess what you’ve submitted, not what you meant to prove. A technically deficient application from a genuine couple is refused just as surely as an application from someone trying to game the system.
We’ll publish a separate guide on what to do if your application is refused. For now, the key point is this: it’s significantly easier—and cheaper—to get it right the first time than to fix a refusal.
Why Professional Help Matters
You could do this yourself. The rules are published. The forms are online. People do successfully apply without legal help.
But the question isn’t whether it’s possible—it’s whether it’s wise.
Spouse visa applications combine technical precision with high stakes. The financial evidence rules are granular and unforgiving. The relationship evidence requires judgment about what to include, how to present it, and how to address potential concerns before a caseworker raises them. The cost of getting it wrong isn’t just the reapplication fee—it’s months more apart, the stress of uncertainty, and the nagging question of whether this attempt will succeed either.
A good immigration lawyer doesn’t just fill in forms. They identify weaknesses in your case before submission, ensure your evidence meets the technical specifications, and present your application in a way that makes the caseworker’s job easy. They’ve seen how applications fail and know what success looks like.
At Migrant Law Partnership, we offer a fixed-fee spouse visa service that covers the full application process: assessing your eligibility, advising on evidence gathering, reviewing and organising your documents, preparing your application, and supporting you through to decision. We also offer document review for those who want to prepare their own application but have it professionally checked before submission.
Book a consultation to discuss your circumstances and whether professional support makes sense for your application.
Migrant Law Partnership
www.migrantlawpartnership.com