Company directors and family businesses: the spouse visa evidence trap

Your salary arrives every month. Tax is deducted through PAYE. Your employer can confirm your job and pay. It is understandable to assume that preparing the financial evidence for your partner’s visa will be straightforward.

Then someone asks who owns the company.

That question can change the evidence required. A director or employee of a family-owned company may fall within the spouse visa rules for a specified limited company, despite receiving PAYE wages.

At Knightsbridge, our starting point is to understand the business structure before requesting documents. Our spouse visa service considers how your income should be presented within the wider application. For company directors and family-business employees, that initial classification deserves particular care.

Start with the ownership structure

Prepare a short description of your role, the company paying you, its shareholders and any relevant family relationships. Where another company appears among the shareholders, ask your accountant to explain the ownership behind it.

Avoid relying on labels such as “small business”, “contractor” or “family firm”. Those descriptions are useful in conversation, but they leave too much unanswered for an evidence review.

An ownership diagram can help. Put the employing company in the centre, identify the people or companies holding its shares, and show how you are connected to them. Add dates where ownership has changed. This gives your adviser something concrete to assess and helps prevent a generic employment checklist being issued too early.

When does the specified-company test apply?

Paragraph 9(a) of Appendix FM-SE combines three conditions: you work as a director or employee of the UK company or its group; you, your partner or a listed relative of either hold shares, directly or indirectly; and any remaining shares belong to fewer than five other people.

These simplified examples show why asking only whether you own shares can miss the issue:

The examples assume straightforward direct ownership and no additional group interests. They illustrate the classification only.

For directors outside this definition, ordinary employment categories may be available, with evidence establishing the company’s position.

Our practical recommendation is to resolve any uncertainty before asking the employer for a standard letter. Where relatives or several companies are involved, send the ownership information with your initial enquiry. It can save repeated requests for documents later.

Choose the relevant financial year before calculating income

Specified-company income is assessed under Category F, using the last full financial year, or Category G, using the average of the last two. The relevant company year follows its CT600 accounting period, rather than automatically following the personal tax year.

For example, imagine a company with a regular year running from 1 April to 31 March. A couple preparing an October 2026 application should identify the completed period ending 31 March 2026 before assembling their calculation.

A useful preparation sheet would put that period at the top, followed by the proposed income figures and the records supporting each figure. If the accountant and immigration adviser are working from different dates, resolve that immediately.

The usual minimum income requirement is currently £29,000, although transitional arrangements and certain benefit-related cases require a different assessment. Confirm the applicable test before deciding whether the company income is sufficient.

Keep salary, dividends and company money distinct

A company’s healthy bank balance can feel reassuring when you are planning married life. For the application, however, the useful question is what that money represents and how it reaches you.

HMRC distinguishes salary, dividends and directors’ loans. Dividends are distributions to shareholders and cannot exceed the company’s available profits. The company must record the declaration and produce dividend vouchers. A withdrawal that is a director’s loan has a different accounting character from salary or dividends.

Ask your accountant to explain unfamiliar transfers before you include them in an income schedule. A payment labelled “director transfer” in a banking app tells an adviser very little. Was it wages, a dividend, repayment of money you lent the company, or reimbursement of an expense?

Our view is that a convincing presentation begins with that explanation. Adding every transfer from the business account into one total creates an avoidable risk of misunderstanding.

Equally, avoid treating the company’s remaining profit as though it were automatically additional personal earnings. A profitable business and a properly evidenced personal income calculation answer different questions. Keep the calculation traceable to the relevant salary and dividend records.

Build the company and personal evidence together

The company bundle includes its CT600 and HMRC filing acknowledgement, Companies House registration, matching annual business statements, and audited accounts where required. Otherwise, unaudited accounts need the prescribed accountant’s certificate. Paragraph 9 also requires an appropriate item from its VAT, business-premises or employer PAYE-registration alternatives.

For salary, assemble period-matched payslips and personal statements, including any issued P60. Dividends require vouchers for declarations during or relating to the CT600 period and personal statements showing receipt. Evidence must also establish continuing employment or dividend income after that financial period.

Treat those requirements as the basis for a tailored document request. Explain to your accountant that the material is for an immigration application and provide the specific request, rather than asking generally for “proof of income”.

It helps to nominate one person to coordinate the response. In a family business, payroll, banking and company records may be handled by different relatives or external advisers. Without coordination, each person can provide accurate material that covers a different period.

Our recommendation is to reconcile those contributions before uploading them. Our guide to organising and uploading visa evidence can help with presentation once the necessary records have been identified.

Plan around the visa application date

HMRC normally allows 12 months after the accounting period ends to file the Company Tax Return. The usual Companies House deadline for subsequent annual accounts is nine months after the financial year ends; first accounts have a different timetable.

Those deadlines explain why an accountant may reasonably say that a return is not due yet. They do not establish that your proposed visa evidence is ready.

Raise the intended application date early. Ask when the accounts can be finalised, when the return can be submitted and when the filing acknowledgement will be available. Build in time for questions and corrections.

This conversation is particularly valuable where the company has recently completed its year, changed accountants or altered its accounting date. A realistic preparation timetable gives everyone the opportunity to identify a problem while there is still time to address it.

Avoid selecting a submission date simply because the latest payslip has arrived. Agree the date against the complete evidence position.

Reconcile the figures before anyone submits them

A good final review follows the money. Start with the income figure being relied upon and identify the document explaining it, the period it belongs to and the bank entry recording payment.

Expect some differences to need explanation. Gross salary and the amount credited after deductions will differ. Accounts and tax computations can also use different measures of profit: HMRC expressly distinguishes accounting profit from profit calculated for Corporation Tax.

The task is to understand each difference and record the explanation clearly. An unexplained discrepancy can absorb more attention than several pages of relevant evidence.

For a practical final check, ask someone who did not prepare the bundle to follow the calculation. Can they identify the company, understand the ownership, locate the relevant year and trace each income component without guessing? If they cannot, improve the explanation and indexing.

New companies, reorganisations and recent ownership changes deserve individual consideration. Gather the dates and supporting records before deciding which assumptions from a straightforward example apply to you.

Make the structure clear from the outset

The frustrating part of a company-income application can be discovering late in the process that everyone has been collecting documents against a different understanding of the business.

Our approach is to settle the structure first, agree the financial period, identify the income being relied upon and then assemble a coordinated evidence bundle. That sequence gives the accountant a clear brief and gives the couple a more realistic view of what remains to be done.

If you receive income through your own company or a family business, request a Case Assessment to review the ownership, relevant financial period and evidence needed for your spouse visa application.