The two-of-seven rule: picking your ILR growth criteria

Endorsement gets you into the UK. It does not get you settled. To apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) on the Innovator Founder route, you have to clear three separate hurdles: continuous residence, a business that is still active and trading, and — the one founders most often mishandle — evidence that the business has met at least two of a defined list of growth criteria. The trap is subtle. "Two criteria" does not mean "hit one target twice as hard." It means two genuinely different achievements from the list.

What are the growth criteria?

The criteria are set out in the Home Office Immigration Rules, Appendix Innovator Founder, and summarised on the GOV.UK ILR guidance. The commonly cited list is:

Why "two distinct criteria" is the whole game

The most expensive misconception on this route is that scale within one criterion substitutes for breadth across two. It does not.

Investing £100,000 is not "criterion (a) twice." It is criterion (a), once, met more comfortably. If that is your only evidenced achievement, your ILR application does not satisfy the two-criteria requirement, no matter how large the number. The same logic applies everywhere: £2,000,000 of revenue is still one revenue criterion, not two; twenty jobs created is still one job-creation criterion, not two.

This matters because the two criteria you choose are not interchangeable at the finish line — they are decisions you make at the start line that shape three years of operational choices.

Which two criteria are realistic for your business type?

The right pair depends heavily on your business model. A few honest patterns:

Services and agency businesses. These rarely reach £1m revenue in three years but often hire steadily. The realistic pair is usually job creation (b or c) plus either investment (a) or the export-revenue route (f) if they sell abroad. A consultancy that reaches 5 people on £25k+ salaries has criterion (c) locked; pairing it with £50k invested and actively spent (a) is a common, achievable combination.

Deep-tech and R&D-heavy businesses. These often burn capital and file IP long before they book meaningful revenue. The natural pair is the R&D-with-IP-application criterion (d) plus investment (a) — both of which can be evidenced while the business is still pre-revenue or early-revenue. Waiting for the £1m revenue criterion (e) here is usually a mistake.

Product businesses with real traction. If you genuinely expect to cross £1m revenue, criterion (e) is available — but treat it as one of two, not the whole plan. Pair it with job creation, because a business turning over £1m almost always has a team you can evidence anyway.

Note the framing: the growth criteria sit on top of the requirement that the business is active, trading and sustainable. They are additional targets, not a substitute for a real, functioning business. A patent plus £50k invested, with no trading business behind it, has been explicitly flagged as insufficient — the fundamentals come first, the two criteria second.

Track your two from month one, not month thirty

The founders who clear ILR cleanly decided which two criteria they were targeting at the start of their endorsement. That decision then drove everything: how they hired, how they spent investment, whether they prioritised an IP filing, whether they chased export revenue.

The founders who struggle are the ones who arrive at the 24-month contact point meeting and realise they cannot evidence a second criterion in the time remaining. Ten jobs cannot be conjured in six months. A £1m revenue year cannot be back-filled. An IP application takes time to prepare and file. By month 30, your options have collapsed to whatever you have already been building toward.

This is exactly why your monthly trading reports should explicitly track progress against your chosen two criteria. If your reports show job count, investment deployed, and R&D milestones month over month, your endorsing body sees a founder building toward a coherent settlement case — and your evidence pack assembles itself.

Building the evidence as you go

Each criterion has a distinct evidence signature, and the time to assemble it is continuously, not retrospectively:

• Investment (a): bank statements and management accounts showing the £50,000 both received into the business and actively spent furthering it. Money sitting in an account is not "actively spent."
• Job creation (b, c): payroll records, contracts, PAYE evidence, and proof the roles are for settled or resident workers at the required salary levels.
• R&D and IP (d): documentation of the R&D activity plus the actual IP application — a filed application, not merely an intention to file.
• Revenue (e, f): audited or clearly evidenced accounts for the last full year, with export sales separately identifiable for criterion (f).

If you model the cost of the job-creation route, note that hiring to hit criterion (b) or (c) is a substantial, sustained payroll commitment — worth costing deliberately rather than assuming. For a structured way to think about that spend, see modeling the cost of job creation.

How this connects to the rest of your ILR case

The two-criteria requirement does not stand alone. It sits alongside the residence requirement (see the 180-day rule), the fresh-endorsement requirement (see switching to ILR), and is one of the most common reasons applications fail (see why ILR applications get refused). Founders who treat all four as a single, month-one planning exercise — rather than four separate month-30 fire drills — are the ones who settle without drama.

Sources and further reading

• GOV.UK — Indefinite leave to remain: Innovator Founder visa (definitive settlement requirements)
• GOV.UK — Immigration Rules Appendix Innovator Founder (the authoritative criteria wording)
• DavidsonMorris — Innovator Founder visa to ILR

Key takeaways

• ILR on the Innovator Founder route requires at least two distinct growth criteria, on top of continuous residence and a business that is active, trading and sustainable.
• Doubling one criterion (e.g. investing £100,000, or booking £2m revenue) still counts as one criterion — it never substitutes for a second.
• The realistic pair depends on business type: services businesses often hit job creation early; deep-tech businesses often hit R&D-with-IP and investment before revenue.
• Decide your two criteria in month one of endorsement and track them in your monthly reports — by month 30, most options are already closed.
• The exact criteria wording, especially the general growth criterion, should always be checked against the live GOV.UK / Appendix Innovator Founder guidance before you rely on it.

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