UK Re-Entry Bans in 2026: Part Suitability Replaced Part 9, and a New Ground Took Effect on 8 October

What changed, and why your paragraph number is wrong

For years, anyone refused a UK visa because of something in their immigration history was handed the same set of numbers. Part 9. The general grounds for refusal. Paragraph 9.8.1 for a previous breach, 9.7.1 for deception. Those numbers are in every template letter, every agent's notes and most of the advice circulating in Pakistan.

Almost every Pakistani agent, forum post and template refusal letter still talks about paragraph 9.8.1 and the Part 9 general grounds. The paragraph numbers in that advice no longer exist in the Rules, even where the underlying rule has not changed.

The Home Office listed it as one line in its own summary of what the October 2025 statement of changes did: Change to replace Part 9: Grounds for Refusal, with Part Suitability. That is the whole announcement.

You can see the gap on the contents page of the Rules. The list runs Immigration Rules part 8: family members, then Immigration Rules: Part Suitability Part Suitability Immigration Rules part 11: asylum. Part 9 is not renamed in that list. It is simply absent.

This is not a cosmetic change, and it is not only a change of label. The replacement brought the suitability tests for different routes into one place and aligned the family and private life rules with them. For an applicant, the practical consequence is simple and slightly brutal. If you are checking your position against a paragraph number you were given eighteen months ago, you are checking against nothing.

Where the re-entry bans live now

The provisions that matter to someone with a history sit in two blocks. SUI 11 defines what counts as a previous breach of immigration laws and sets out when an application must or may be refused because of one. SUI 12 holds the table of time periods, which is the part people actually want to see.

SUI 13 then carves out the exceptions for overstayers, and that is where the fourteen-day rule lives.

Read in that order the structure makes sense. First the Rules ask whether you breached. Then they ask how you left and at whose cost. Then they count forward from that date. Then, and only then, they check whether one of the exceptions pulls you back out.

What counts as a previous breach

An applicant aged 18 or over is treated as having breached immigration laws if they overstayed their permission, breached a condition attached to it, were or still are an illegal entrant, or used deception in relation to a previous application, whether or not it succeeded.

Four limbs, and until recently that was the complete list. Note the detail on conditions: a breach of condition is forgiven where entry clearance or further permission was afterwards granted in the knowledge of the breach. The Home Office cannot grant you something with its eyes open and then hold the same facts against you later.

Note also what is absent from the list. A refused application is not there. Neither is a withdrawn one, nor a credibility interview that went badly, nor an immigration history that is merely untidy. Plenty of people in Pakistan believe they carry a ban when they do not. The table only reaches you if one of the listed breaches applies.

The fifth limb, added on 8 October 2026

Since October 2026 there is a fifth limb, and it is the broadest of them. An applicant is treated as having breached immigration laws if they have (e) acted to frustrate immigration controls as set out in SUI 11.7.

The wording came from a statement of changes laid before Parliament on 3 September 2026. Its instruction to the Rules is two lines long: In SUI 11.4(d), for ".", substitute "; or". After SUI 11.4(d), insert: "(e) acted to frustrate immigration controls as set out in SUI 11.7.".

The conduct itself is listed rather than defined. SUI 11.7 gives failing to cooperate with redocumentation, arrest or removal, using a false identity, failing to report or absconding from immigration bail, obtaining benefits, employment or private rented housing without entitlement, (e) used multiple identities, and participating in immigration related crime.

Look closely at that list, because two entries on it reach much further than the rest. Obtaining employment or private rented housing without entitlement is not an exotic scenario. It is what happens when someone's permission lapses and they keep the job or the room they already had. On the wording of the Rules, that conduct can now put a person into the same category as someone who absconded.

The commencement wording is where the protection sits. The change took effect on 8 October 2026, and for applications lodged before that morning, such applications will be decided in accordance with the Immigration Rules in force on 7 October 2026.

Keep your submission receipt. The protection turns on the date the application was made, not the date somebody gets round to deciding it, and a queue of several months is ordinary. If your application was in that queue on 8 October 2026, the older version of the Rules is the one that should be applied to it.

How long the ban runs

The table in SUI 12.1 sets the length. Where a person has breached more than one immigration law, only the breach producing the longest period applies, so there is no stacking.

The shortest row on the table is the one most Pakistani applicants fall into, and it is the one worth protecting. It reads (a) 12 months left voluntarily at their own expense, with no further condition attached.

Leaving at public expense is treated as a different act entirely. The table gives two years where the person went within six months of being told they were liable for removal, and (c) 5 years left voluntarily at public expense where they went later than that.

The longest rows run to a decade. One covers removal from the UK at public expense. The other is (f) 10 years Used deception in an application, which the table notes applies, for visits, to applications for entry clearance only.

Two things in that table decide almost every case, and neither of them is the breach itself. The first is whether you left under your own steam or at the taxpayer's. The second is when the clock starts. For the first five rows it runs from the date the person left the UK. For deception it runs from the date the application was refused, which is a different date and often a much earlier one.

We have written separately about that final row, because deception carries consequences beyond the ten years and is argued differently from every other ground. If an allegation of false documents or false statements has been made against you, read our guide to UK deception refusals and the 10-year re-entry ban rather than relying on this page.

The overstaying that gets disregarded

The disregard is narrow and the dates matter. A period of overstaying is set aside only where the person left the UK voluntarily and not at public expense, and either they overstayed for 90 days or less where the overstaying began before 6 April 2017, or (b) the person overstayed for 30 days or less, where the overstaying began on or after 6 April 2017.

Three conditions, all of which have to hold. The departure must be voluntary. It must not be funded by the state, directly or indirectly. And the overstaying has to fit inside the window that applies to its start date.

The 6 April 2017 line catches people out constantly, because the older 90-day figure is still quoted in Pakistan as though it were current. It applies only to overstaying that began before that date. Anything that began afterwards gets 30 days and no more.

A further provision deals with overstaying caused by the Home Office itself. Where the overstaying arose from a refusal or a cancellation that was later withdrawn, quashed or reconsidered by direction of a court or tribunal, it is not counted at all, unless the legal challenge that produced the reconsideration was brought more than three months after the original decision. If a bad decision was overturned, the time you spent without permission because of it should not be held against you.

The 14-day rescue, and section 3C

There is a rescue clause, and it is short. An applicant is not treated as an overstayer if their application was made within 14 days of their previous permission expiring, and the decision maker accepts there was a good reason beyond the applicant's control, given in or with the application, for why it could not be made in time.

Read that clause slowly, because the sting is in the last part. The good reason has to be provided in or with the application. Not later. Not at appeal. Not when a refusal arrives and somebody finally explains that the applicant's father was in hospital. If the explanation is not in the application, the exception is usually gone.

There is a second branch covering applications made within 14 days of the refusal or rejection of an earlier in-time application, or within 14 days of the end of permission extended by statute, or of the time limit for bringing an appeal or administrative review.

That gap is covered by statute rather than by the Rules. Section 3C of the Immigration Act 1971, headed Continuation of leave pending variation decision, keeps an applicant's existing permission alive while an in-time application is undecided.

This is the single most important mechanical fact in UK immigration for anyone already in the country. Apply before your permission expires and your status continues while the decision is pending. Apply one day after it expires and there is nothing left to continue, you are an overstayer from that day, and you are relying on a fourteen-day exception with a reason you had better have written down. Our guide to extending a UK student visa from inside the UK goes through the timing in detail, and the deadline that catches students out covers the specific trap of counting from the wrong date.

Must refuse, may refuse, and why the difference is everything

The Rules draw a line that gets flattened in most summaries. Where the applicant has previously breached immigration laws and the application was made inside the relevant time period, entry clearance or permission to enter must be refused. There is no discretion in that sentence.

Outside the time period a different provision applies. An application may be refused where the applicant previously breached and has acted to frustrate immigration controls. May, not must. And a third provision allows refusal where the applicant is or has been in breach of immigration laws, which is wider still and carries no time limit of its own.

So the end of your ban period is not the end of the inquiry. It removes the mandatory refusal. It does not remove the caseworker's power to refuse, particularly where the new frustration ground is in play. Anyone telling you that a date in the past wipes the file clean is overstating it.

Where a refusal has already landed and you think the caseworker has applied the wrong provision or the wrong date, the route to challenge it depends on what you applied for. Start with our guide to UK administrative review after a visa refusal, and where no administrative review is available, read how judicial review of a UK visa refusal works and what it costs.

What this actually means from Pakistan

Most of the people who contact us about a ban fall into one of four situations, and the right answer is different in each.

Someone who overstayed briefly and flew home on a ticket they paid for themselves is usually not banned at all, provided the overstaying was 30 days or less and began on or after 6 April 2017. The paperwork that proves it is the boarding pass and the payment record. Those two documents are worth more than any amount of explanation.

Someone who left on an assisted return is in a much harder position, because the departure was funded by the state. That moves them off the twelve-month row and onto two or five years depending on when they went. People in this group are frequently told they have a one-year ban. They generally do not.

Someone refused for deception is on the ten-year row, counted from the refusal rather than from any departure, and should be reading the dedicated guide rather than this one.

Someone whose permission lapsed while they stayed on in a job or a tenancy now needs to think about the October 2026 ground as well as the overstaying. That is the group most affected by this year's change, and the group least likely to know about it.

The common thread is that the facts people remember are rarely the facts the Rules ask about. Nobody remembers whether the Home Office contributed to their flight. Everybody remembers roughly how long they overstayed, usually with an error of a week or two in the optimistic direction. The Rules are counting precisely.

How to work out your own position

Work through it in the same order the Rules do, and write the answers down as you go.

• Establish the exact date your last permission expired, from the document rather than from memory.
• Find the date you physically left the UK, and the evidence that fixes it.
• Work out who paid for that departure, and whether any part of it was publicly funded.
• Check whether the overstaying fits the 30-day disregard, using the date the overstaying began.
• Only then go to the table, pick the row and count forward.
• Ask separately whether anything in your history could be characterised as frustrating immigration controls.

If the answer to any of those is genuinely uncertain, the uncertainty is the thing to resolve before an application goes anywhere near a fee. A refusal under these provisions is expensive twice over, once for the fee and once because the refusal itself then has to be declared.

If you are holding a refusal letter that cites a paragraph beginning with 9, or you are trying to count a ban period and cannot tell which row of the table applies, speak to our team with your dates and documents to hand. More UK material, including refusals, extensions and settlement, sits on our UK immigration hub.

Frequently asked questions

Does Part 9 of the Immigration Rules still exist?

No. The general grounds for refusal that used to sit in Part 9 were replaced by a new section called Part Suitability. The contents page of the Immigration Rules now runs straight from part 8 on family members to Part Suitability and then to part 11 on asylum. If a letter, a template or an adviser quotes you a paragraph beginning 9, they are working from a version of the Rules that has been superseded.

Have the actual re-entry ban periods changed?

The lengths in the table are the familiar ones: twelve months, two years, five years and ten years, triggered by how the person left the UK and at whose expense. What changed is the numbering and the structure around them, plus the addition of a new category of breach in October 2026. Do not assume that because the periods look the same, nothing else did.

What is the new ground that came in on 8 October 2026?

A fifth way of being treated as someone who has previously breached immigration laws: acting to frustrate immigration controls. The Rules list examples rather than giving a closed definition, and they include using a false identity, using multiple identities, absconding from immigration bail, failing to cooperate with removal, working or renting without entitlement, and involvement in immigration crime.

I applied before 8 October 2026 and I am still waiting. Does the new ground apply to me?

The statement of changes says applications made before 8 October 2026 are to be decided under the Rules as they stood on 7 October 2026. On its face that protects an application already in the queue on that date. It is worth keeping proof of your submission date, because the protection turns on when the application was made rather than when it is decided.

I overstayed by about three weeks and then flew home at my own cost. Am I banned?

Probably not, on those facts. A period of overstaying is disregarded where the person left voluntarily and not at public expense and the overstaying ran for 30 days or less, for overstaying that began on or after 6 April 2017. The older 90-day figure only applies to overstaying that began before that date. Keep the boarding pass and anything showing you paid for the ticket yourself.

Who counts as having left at public expense?

In broad terms, someone whose departure was paid for directly or indirectly by the Secretary of State, which includes assisted voluntary return in many cases. It matters a great deal, because leaving at your own expense attracts the twelve-month row while leaving at public expense moves you to two years or five years depending on timing.

Does a refused application on its own create a ban?

No. A refusal is not a breach of immigration laws by itself. The ban table is triggered by overstaying, breaching a condition, illegal entry, deception in a previous application, or frustrating immigration controls. A straightforward refusal where you then left in time does not put you on the table at all.

What is the 14-day rule I keep hearing about?

It is an exception for overstayers. You are not treated as an overstayer if the application was made within 14 days of your previous permission expiring and you gave a good reason, beyond your control, in or with the application for why it was late. The reason has to be supplied at the time, not invented afterwards, which is where most of these arguments are lost.

How does section 3C protect me while I wait for a decision?

Section 3C of the Immigration Act 1971 continues your existing permission while an application you made in time is still undecided, and through an in-time appeal or administrative review. That is why applying before your permission expires matters so much. Apply a day late and there is nothing for section 3C to continue.

Is the refusal automatic, or does a caseworker have a choice?

Both appear in the Rules, which is why the distinction is worth understanding. Where the breach falls inside the relevant time period, refusal of entry clearance or permission to enter is mandatory. Outside that period there is a discretionary power, which bites where the applicant acted to frustrate immigration controls, and a separate discretionary ground for anyone who is or has been in breach.

Does the ban run from when I was refused or from when I left?

From the date the person left the UK, for the first rows of the table, which is why the departure date and the evidence of it are so important. The deception row is the exception: it runs from the date the application was refused. Getting this wrong by a few months is one of the commonest reasons an application is lodged too early and simply fails.

My ban period has ended. Am I now in the clear?

The mandatory refusal falls away once the relevant time period has passed, but the discretionary grounds do not disappear with it, and a history of frustrating immigration controls can still be weighed against you. Expect to explain the history rather than hope it goes unnoticed, and expect the caseworker to have the full record in front of them.