Will the permanent residency change to a 10-year period retrospectively apply to the old visa? How to understand the ILR transition arrangement?

More than seven months have passed since the deadline for earned settlement consultation.

The consultation closed on 23:59 on February 12, 2026. As of today, September 18, 2026, no Statement of Changes has included "ten-year baseline" in the Immigration Rules, and the government has not yet published the consultation response and impact assessment. The entire set of rules for the five-year route remains fully valid, and the applicable fees and salary calculations of £41,700 should be followed as usual.

What really keeps people awake is not "whether it will be changed," but "whether the change will be attributed to me."

Ten-year permanent residency new regulations, which stage is it currently in?

In November 2025, Home Office released "A Fairer Pathway to Settlement," proposing to extend the default eligibility period from five years to ten years, and then add or subtract years based on income, type of work, English proficiency, and compliance record. The three boundaries are currently clear:

Those who have already obtained ILR or settled status are clearly unaffected; the partners, parents, and children of British citizens, as well as the BN(O) route, are retained in the proposal for five years; doctors and nurses under the NHS category are also included in the retention. Only one group remains ambiguous: residents in the UK who are already on the way but have not yet obtained permanent residency. The government's position is that the new system will apply to those who have not obtained permanent residency by the effective date, but transitional arrangements for this group remain "pending" to date.

In terms of timing, most professionals expect it to take effect in the autumn of 2026, while some believe it may slide to early 2027. Before an exact effective date is determined, any statement saying "starting XX0YY month XX1YY day for ten years" is just a guess.

The rules on the day of submission are not necessarily the rules for reviewing you.

A saying circulates in the circle: "Submit your application before the new regulations take effect, and it will be reviewed under the old rules." This statement does not hold under British law.

Odelola v SSHD [2009] UKHL 25: The House of Lords held that the application should be decided in accordance with the Immigration Rules as they were effective on the day when the application was made, not the version on the day it was submitted; the applicant did not acquire a vested right to be assessed under the old rules. The judgment also mentioned that if changes in the rules resulted in the application being doomed to fail, refunding the application fee would be an appropriate course of action.

This means that what protects you is never the timestamp submission, but what Statement of Changes yourself wrote. Each implementation section at the end of the changes will list in detail: which applications are handled under the old rules, what date is used as the cutoff, and whether approved licenses are exempt. The way of "calculating absence in segments before and after" that was introduced when Appendix Long Residence went live on April 11, 2024, came about this way.

My judgment: The filing date does not protect you, the approval date does.

How was this line drawn last time?

There was an operation highly similar to this one, which is worth referring to. Tier 2 set a salary threshold of £35,000 during the permanent residency stage, which was announced in 2011 and came into effect on April 6, 2016; moreover, it only applied to those who entered Tier 2 on or after April 6, 2011, people who had obtained work permits or Tier 2 before this date were completely exempt throughout. A five-year lead time, plus "drawing a line based on the entry path date," was the approach taken back then.

The two chambers of parliament have also expressed their views. A report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee on March 13, 2026, called for clear transitional arrangements and recommended that those who entered before 2021 and are on the ten-year path should not be subject to the new system; a report by the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee in June 2026 considered that applying the "manifestly unfair" rule to those already on the eligibility path could lead to legal challenges. Both are committee reports and are not legally binding, so the government can choose not to adopt them.

So a reasonable expectation is: there will be transitional provisions, but they may be narrower than you hope. Take it as a planning assumption, not a safety net.

Finish these things before the rules are implemented

1. Accurately calculate your expiration date down to the day, and submit it on the expiration day, do not delay due to waiting for policy clarification. When calculating continuous residence and the 180-day rolling window, use 永居计算器 to check day by day, comparing with the passport reversal is reliable.

2. Maintain the current standard: salary does not drop, guarantee is not interrupted, outbound within 12 months does not exceed 180 days, and Life in the UK and B1 are completed in advance. Do not relax any item just because "it may be changed in ten years".

3. Don't change your path now for the yet-to-be-written reduction-in-years program in the proposal. The cost of switching employers for a higher salary bracket, or taking the C1 exam to gain points, is real, while the benefits remain only in the consultation documents. If you're unsure which category you belong to, spending £5 on justiscript.com to get a written response from a UK-qualified lawyer within 24 hours is much cheaper than acting on forum rumors.

4. On the day the new regulations were announced, don't look at the media headlines, go directly to Statement of Changes's final implementation section, and check how it describes the licensing issuance date for people like you.

This document is for reference only. For specific issues, please consult a licensed attorney.

[Data Source] gov.uk/government/consultations/earned-settlement; publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmhaff/1409/report.html; publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldjudgmt/jd090520/odelol-1.htm

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