UK Asylum Statistics

Asylum is the legal right of anyone who has reached the UK to claim refugee protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol. A person claiming asylum is asserting that they face a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country on grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. It is not illegal to claim asylum, regardless of how the person arrived.

In 2025, the UK received 82,100 applications, involving 100,600 individuals (some applications cover families). This is the third-highest annual total on record, behind the peaks of 2022 and 2023. Of initial decisions made that year, 45% granted some form of protection - either refugee status or Humanitarian Protection. The remaining 55% received an initial refusal, though many of those go on to appeal (see our tribunal data page).

Grant rates vary enormously by nationality, reflecting genuine differences in the security situations of origin countries. Yemen (94%) and Sudan (91%) have near-certain grant rates, reflecting civil wars recognised by the UK courts as creating a well-founded fear for the vast majority of applicants. Afghanistan (88%) similarly reflects the Taliban's return to power. At the other end, India (1.4%) and Brazil (1.1%) have almost universally refused claims - both are stable democracies where asylum claims rarely meet the legal threshold.

Small boat Channel crossings continued to rise in 2025 after a brief fall in 2023. The 2023 dip was largely attributed to the Albania returns agreement - Albanians fell from the top small-boat nationality once removals accelerated - but other nationalities filled the gap. Eritreans (17%), Afghans (13%), and Iranians (11%) are now the dominant nationalities. The full-year 2025 total of 41,472 arrivals by small boat compares to 29,437 in 2023 and the peak of 45,755 in 2022.

Home Office accommodation for asylum seekers reached significant scale in 2025. 111,651 people were in Home Office-funded accommodation at the end of September 2025, of whom 36,273 (32%) were in hotels or other contingency accommodation - a category the government had sought to eliminate but was forced to reopen from autumn 2024 as the backlog of unprocessed claims grew. An estimated 600,000–1.2 million irregular migrants remain in the UK (Migration Observatory estimate, 2025), including visa overstayers and those whose claims have been refused but who have not been removed.