UK Shortens Graduate Route from January 2027 – Who’s Affected and What Will the Impact Be?

First announced in the May white paper, the reduction of the UK’s Graduate Route post-study-work-visa from 24 to 18 months has now been confirmed as taking effect for visa applications made after 1 January 2027. The change applies to Bachelors and Masters degrees, not to PhDs (which retain a 3-year option).

Crucially, this date applies to applications for the visa, not the course. That means most future applicants will be impacted and so will current students on courses lasting more than 12 months (e.g. Bachelors and 2-year Masters).

I’m sure I’m not the only person to find some of this disappointing, in so far as it alters the expectations of people who are currently applying, preparing for (or studying) a UK degree – and this in a heavily disrupted year for international education generally.

But let’s try to make sense of the changes, confirm who they actually impact and consider what students (and universities) might do in response.

Which students are impacted by the Graduate Route visa cut?

This change is tied to the date of the visa application, not the course start or graduation date.

Of course, in order to apply for the post-study-work-visa, somebody needs to have begun and completed a UK degree: but what actually matters is when they apply for the visa.

In practice this impacts intakes for:

• January 2026 onwards - all Bachelors and most (if not all) Masters enrolments made next year will complete after the 1 January 2027 cut-off
• September 2025—All Bachelor's enrolments will be impacted, but traditional one-year full-time Master's students will have a short window to apply, provided they graduate on time in autumn 2026.
• January 2025 – all Bachelors enrolments will be impacted and so will Masters degrees lasting more than two years (e.g. part-time or MRes courses)

Some current international undergraduates who enrolled for three-year degrees in 2024 could also find themselves graduating after the cut off, but the main focus will be at Masters level (where 71% of full-time students in the UK are international, as opposed to 16% of undergraduates).

What impact could this have on January 2026?

We’ve seen very strong trends for interest in UK study across Keystone platforms this year, particularly at Masters level where search has been up more than 50% on last year for several months now. Some of this has been due to the ‘pull’ of the UK, but ‘push’ factors are also in play, as interest shifts globally.

The most recent data also sees study visa applications up 7% over 2024, as of September (albeit still down -13% on 2023).

And there’s a chance some students were deferring study plans beyond September, as our Keystone Pulse survey data (which tracks trends across cycles) finds interest in 2026 up 10 percentage points in Q3 compared to the same period in 2024.

Things were looking good for January 2026. But the news that (most) of those students will now receive a shorter post-study-work entitlement is definitely going to have an impact.

The question is how much?

Our previous audience research (conducted after the white paper proposals) revealed that only a small proportion of prospective students were substantially put off by a Graduate Route change:

There’s a glass-half-empty read here, as the majority are impacted in some way. But I think it’s just as fair to point to that 16% and say that very few people see this as a deal breaker.

After all, this isn’t the abolition of post-study-work (and far more drastic cuts have previously been floated) with students retaining more than a year to find work or work experience after their degree. 18 months is shorter than 24 months and shorter than the typical equivalents in Australia and Canada – but it’s still longer than the standard 12 months available via Optional Practical Training (OPT) in the USA.

Which audiences will be most impacted?

How significant this change will be depends on how significant post-study-work is to someone’s decision-making (there are, after all, many other reasons why people do a Masters).

Our Pulse survey asks whether prospective students intend to stay to work in their study country after graduation. I think the results are actually quite surprising:

I’ve broken this down across some broad geos, all at Masters level. What’s immediately apparent is that preferences are quite similar. Asian and African audiences are a little more committed to post-study-work than their peers from Europe or North America, which is what we’d expect and tallies with UK enrolment data following the introduction of the Graduate Route in 2021 (when India in particular grew substantially).

But for most people in most audiences, staying to work after a Masters abroad is a ‘maybe’ not a ‘definitely’.

Yes. Post-study work matters. Cutting the graduate route matters. Bringing this change in from January 2026 (de facto) is going to matter.

But it’s not going to be the only thing that matters.

All eyes should now be on search and application trends heading into the new year. Ours certainly will be and we’ll share what we see.

How to respond?

In the meantime, prospective students will be looking for advice and guidance to explain exactly what the Graduate Route change means for them.

They’ll need to know whether the cut off date definitely impacts their course and they’ll need to be reassured as to what else is and isn’t changing. They may also have renewed questions about the exact process for applying to the Graduate Route, the difference between a graduation data and a graduation ceremony, etc. Many things that ‘we’ know because it’s our job, but which need to remember that students don’t, necessarily.

As I find myself saying increasingly often these days: you can’t be the university that changes policy, but you can be a university where policy changes make sense.

Dr. Mark Bennett

Dr. Mark Bennett is the VP of Research and Insights at Keystone Education Group. Leveraging Keystone's unique data and insights, Mark regularly presents on global higher education trends, recruitment, and policy topics, having previously spoken at events organized by NAFSA, CASE Universities Marketing Forum (UMF), HELOA, NAGAP, ContentEd, the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE), Westminster Forum and others. Mark taught at multiple UK universities prior to joining Keystone and holds a PhD in gothic literature from the University of Sheffield.