What 10 jobs actually cost: modeling job creation in your BP

The job-creation numbers in the Innovator Founder Visa are usually discussed as a settlement requirement — something to worry about years down the line when you apply for indefinite leave to remain. That framing causes a specific and avoidable mistake: founders write a compelling job-creation narrative into their business plan without ever modelling what those jobs cost or when they can realistically be hired. The result is a plan where the headline story and the financial model quietly disagree, and an experienced assessor notices the gap immediately.

What the settlement criterion actually requires

The GOV.UK Immigration Rules Appendix Innovator Founder sets out the settlement conditions. One route is creating the equivalent of at least 10 full-time jobs for settled or resident workers. An alternative is 5 full-time jobs each paying at least £25,000 a year. In both cases, each job must have existed for at least 12 months, and every job must comply with UK employment law — including the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 and the Working Time Regulations 1998 (GOV.UK Appendix Innovator Founder).

A full-time job is treated as an average of at least 30 hours per week. Two or more part-time roles can combine into a single full-time equivalent, provided they total 30-plus hours a week and each has existed for 12 months or more. This flexibility matters for modelling: a business that hires several part-time specialists can still build toward the equivalent count, but the loaded cost of each still has to appear in the model.

The point most founders miss is that this is a financial modelling requirement long before it is a settlement checkbox. The cost of these people flows through your operating costs from the moment you hire them. If your model does not fund them, the narrative is fiction.

Why gross salary understates the real cost

Hiring someone costs more than their salary. On top of gross pay, a UK employer pays employer National Insurance contributions and, under auto-enrolment, a minimum pension contribution. There are also one-off and recurring costs — recruitment, equipment, software licences, and the office or remote-working overhead. Modelling headcount at gross salary alone systematically understates your cost base, and it is exactly the kind of understatement an assessor is trained to probe.

The wage floor itself is a compliance constraint. The National Living Wage and National Minimum Wage set the legal minimum hourly rate, and any job you model has to clear it once you divide pay by hours (GOV.UK National Minimum Wage rates). For pension obligations, the auto-enrolment employer duties set the minimum you must contribute (The Pensions Regulator: employer duties).

A worked hiring timeline

You cannot hire ten people in month one. Nor should your model pretend to. A credible plan stages hiring against revenue and cash milestones, so headcount grows as the business can afford it. Here is an illustrative build toward 10 full-time equivalents over three years, showing cumulative loaded cost. The loaded cost per role here assumes gross salary plus roughly 15% for employer NI and pension combined — use current rates for your own model.

The exact figures are illustrative — what matters is the shape. Headcount ramps in step with revenue, each hire carries a loaded cost roughly 15% above gross, and by the end of the horizon the business supports the equivalent of ten full-time roles that have each existed long enough to count. That is a story a model can defend.

Keeping the cost base and the narrative consistent

The reason this matters so much is internal consistency. An assessor reads your job-creation narrative and then reads your financial model, and they check whether the two agree. This cross-check is one of the sharpest tools they have, and it is closely related to the financial model red flags that damage credibility fastest — chief among them a cost base that does not support the operational story it sits next to.

Headcount is also one of the largest lines in your operating costs, which puts it at the centre of the I-P-O-C framework — specifically the Operating costs pillar. And because every hire increases burn, staged hiring is inseparable from the 24-month runway rule: hire too fast and you run out of cash before the jobs can mature; hire too slowly and you miss the settlement count.

Use the free assessment at /assess — five assessments, no card — to check whether your operating costs and job-creation plan hold together under the endorsement criteria. For more in this series, see /insights.

Finally, the assumptions that drive your revenue determine how fast you can afford to hire. Build those with the same rigour — see building revenue assumptions assessors won't reject — so your hiring timeline is funded by a revenue line that is itself defensible.

Key takeaways

• The Innovator Founder settlement criterion needs the equivalent of 10 full-time jobs (or 5 at £25,000+), each existing 12 months and compliant with UK employment law — and each carries a cost from the day you hire.
• Model the loaded cost, not gross salary: add employer National Insurance and pension auto-enrolment, plus recruitment and equipment, or you will understate your cost base.
• Stage hiring against revenue and cash milestones — you cannot credibly hire ten people in month one, and a model that pretends otherwise fails the consistency check.
• Watch the 12-month clock: roles counted toward settlement must be in place long enough to qualify, so do not cluster hires at the end of your visa period.
• Headcount is the largest lever connecting your job-creation narrative to your operating costs and runway — keep all three internally consistent.

• financial-model
• job-creation
• hiring
• operating-costs
• settlement