Yes, the United Kingdom grants permanent residence to people who arrived as students. The route exists and Nepali students walk it every year. It just does not run through the part of the journey most people are sold.
Here is the whole thing in one line: master's, then Graduate Route, then a sponsored job paying at least £41,700, then five years on that job. The Graduate Route is a corridor between two rooms. It is not a room.
The Graduate Route, and what it is not
After you finish a degree you can apply to stay without a job offer. GOV.UK gives the duration as two years if you apply on or before 31 December 2026, and 18 months if you apply on or after 1 January 2027. A doctorate gets three years under either. It costs £937 to apply, plus the immigration health surcharge at usually £1,035 for each year you will be in the UK.
Two facts about it decide everything that follows.
It cannot be extended. GOV.UK says so plainly. When it ends, it ends, and your only move is to have already switched onto something else.
It does not count towards five-year settlement. This is the detail that costs people years. The Home Office's own settlement statement puts it directly: time on the Graduate route does not count towards five-year settlement, though it does count towards a ten-year long residence settlement. So two years of working in the UK, paying tax, renting a flat, can leave your settlement clock reading zero.
If you treat the Graduate Route as a job hunt that starts in month one, it is the most generous thing in the UK system. If you treat it as two years of breathing space, it is two years you do not get back.
The switch, which is the hard part
To stay beyond the Graduate Route you need an employer holding a sponsor licence to offer you a Skilled Worker role. The general salary threshold published by GOV.UK is £41,700 a year, or the going rate for the occupation if that is higher, whichever is greater. A reduced threshold of £33,400 applies to some applicants.
Read that number against the course you are choosing. £41,700 is not a graduate starting salary in most of the country and in most fields. It is reachable quickly in health, care, IT and engineering, where sponsors are common and sponsorship is routine. It is a long way from reachable in fields where few employers hold a licence at all.
This is why the course choice, made a year before you fly, is the single decision that determines whether settlement is available to you. Not the university's ranking, and not the city.
Then five years, or possibly ten
A Skilled Worker visa can last up to five years, and GOV.UK states that after five years you may be able to apply to settle permanently.
That is the rule as published on 29 September 2026, and it is the rule you should plan against today. It is also a rule the government has said it intends to change.
In its earned settlement statement the Home Office proposed that the default qualifying period for settlement rise from the current five years to ten, with exceptions raising or lowering it for individuals. The consultation on it closed at 23:59 on 12 February 2026. The statement is explicit that the change would apply to everyone in the country who has not already been granted indefinite leave to remain, not only to people arriving afterwards, and equally explicit that settled status already granted will not be taken away.
As of 29 September 2026 the GOV.UK settlement guidance still states the five-year period for work routes, so the announced change is not yet the law. We will update this page when it is, and we will date it when we do.
Two honest conclusions follow. The first is that nobody, including us, can currently tell a student starting a master's in 2027 how many years stand between them and settlement, and anybody who gives you a confident number is telling you about the consultation they have not read. The second is that the uncertainty runs one way. The proposal is to make settlement longer, not shorter, so a plan that only works if the rules stay generous is not a plan.
What this means if you are choosing now
Pick the course by whether its graduates get sponsored, not by the brochure. Start applying for sponsored roles in the first term of the Graduate Route, not at the end of it. Keep every payslip and every visa document, because a long-residence route counts days and the burden of proving them is yours.
And decide, before you spend the money, whether you actually want to settle. A UK master's with two years of work afterwards is a good outcome on its own terms. It only becomes a disappointment if it was sold to you as permanent residence, which it is not, and never was.