Net migration has fallen sharply to 171,000 (provisional) — but the total hides very different gross flows by route
171,000 people arrived long-term more than left, on the latest provisional estimate — but 813,000 arrived in total, and net migration and immigration answer different questions. This page keeps them separate rather than reducing the picture to one number.
Read this first — what else changes the meaning of the headline
- Gross immigration
- 813k
813,000 people arrived long-term in the year ending December 2025 — down from a ~1.44 million peak in 2023, but far larger than the net figure alone suggests.
ONS, Long-term international migration, provisional (YE Dec 2025 edition, Tables 1 & 4b)
- Gross emigration
- ~642k(calculated)
UK Facts calculation: gross immigration minus published net migration, using ONS's own definition. Not a separately-published ONS headline figure.
- Asylum share of non-EU+ arrivals
- 14%
Work and study routes make up most non-EU+ arrivals by reason — asylum, which dominates headlines, is a minority of the total.
- British and EU+ net migration
- Both negative
More British and EU+ nationals left the UK than arrived in 2025 — all of the positive net total comes from non-EU+ nationals.
Provisional; rounded to the nearest 1,000; Official statistics in development; subject to routine revision for roughly 12 months.
Gross migration: who is arriving, and why
813,000 people immigrated long-term in the year ending December 2025 — down from a peak of about 1.44 million in 2023. Switch views to see arrivals split by nationality, or non-EU+ arrivals split by reason.
Who is arriving: British nationals returning (mostly expats), EU+ nationals, and non-EU+ nationals. Full 14-year span of the ONS series.
View data table
| Year (ending Dec) | British nationals returning ('000s) | EU+ nationals ('000s) | Non-EU+ nationals ('000s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 79 | 334 | 230 |
| 2013 | 76 | 402 | 234 |
| 2014 | 81 | 457 | 241 |
| 2015 | 78 | 481 | 238 |
| 2016 | 70 | 465 | 237 |
| 2017 | 84 | 411 | 257 |
| 2018 | 74 | 421 | 330 |
| 2019 | 71 | 349 | 368 |
| 2020 | 52 | 316 | 294 |
| 2021 | 164 | 173 | 610 |
| 2022 | 166 | 141 | 1091 |
| 2023 | 150 | 103 | 1188 |
| 2024 | 140 | 91 | 780 |
| 2025 | 110 | 76 | 627 |
Figures are thousands of people per year-ending-December period, rounded to the nearest 1,000 by ONS, so stacked segments can differ from published totals by a few thousand. The UK does not publish an 'illegal immigration' component of long-term migration; the closest sourced measure is the ONS asylum category, which includes people who arrived irregularly (e.g. by small boat) as well as those who claimed asylum after arriving via a regular route. The by-reason split is only published for non-EU+ nationals, and only from 2019. YE Dec 2025 is provisional.
Source: ONS, Long-term international migration, provisional (YE Dec 2025 edition, Tables 1 & 4b) · as of YE Dec 2025 (provisional), published 21 May 2026
What share of UK immigration is asylum and humanitarian routes?
Asylum seekers, refugees and people arriving on refugee family reunion visas, as a share of total immigration to the UK in 2025.
Scope note: Commons Library figure for long-term immigration (entry via a visa or asylum claim); it excludes short-term visitors. "Other immigration" covers work, study, standard family and all remaining routes. If the Hong Kong BN(O) scheme is counted as humanitarian, the humanitarian share rises to around 17%.
View data table
| Category | Share |
|---|---|
| Asylum, refugees & family reunion (humanitarian) | 16% |
| Work, study, standard family & other routes | 84% |
United Kingdom · Source: ONS, Long-term international migration (immigration by reason); share computed by the House of Commons Library · as of 2025
What the facts show
Long-term net migration has fallen
The latest provisional estimate is lower than the revised estimate for the previous year.
View data table
| Period | Net migration | Status |
|---|---|---|
| YE Dec 2024 | 331,000 | Revised in May 2026 release |
| YE Dec 2025 | 171,000 | Provisional |
Source: ONS Long-term international migration, provisional · as of YE Dec 2025
Net migration: arrivals minus departures
Net migration was 171,000 in the year ending December 2025 — nearly half the 331,000 of 2024, and far below the 2023 peak of 848,000. British and EU+ net migration are both negative: more left than arrived.
Arrivals minus departures for each group. Bars below zero mean more of that group left the UK than arrived — true of British nationals in every year of the series. The line is the overall net total.
View data table
| Year (ending Dec) | British nationals (net) ('000s) | EU+ nationals (net) ('000s) | Non-EU+ nationals (net) ('000s) | Total net migration ('000s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | -72 | 206 | 61 | 195 |
| 2013 | -81 | 262 | 63 | 244 |
| 2014 | -80 | 277 | 87 | 284 |
| 2015 | -73 | 287 | 88 | 303 |
| 2016 | -94 | 253 | 90 | 249 |
| 2017 | -81 | 176 | 114 | 208 |
| 2018 | -72 | 170 | 178 | 276 |
| 2019 | -82 | 80 | 186 | 184 |
| 2020 | -78 | 70 | 101 | 93 |
| 2021 | -69 | 15 | 522 | 467 |
| 2022 | -81 | -9 | 981 | 891 |
| 2023 | -104 | -53 | 1005 | 848 |
| 2024 | -117 | -63 | 511 | 331 |
| 2025 | -136 | -42 | 350 | 171 |
Bars below the zero line are groups where departures exceeded arrivals in that year — true of British nationals in every year of this series. Segments are rounded independently by ONS, so they can differ from the total line by a few thousand. YE Dec 2025 is provisional; earlier years reflect ONS revisions up to the May 2026 release.
Source: ONS, Long-term international migration, provisional (YE Dec 2025 edition, Tables 1 & 4b) · as of YE Dec 2025 (provisional), published 21 May 2026
Detected arrivals via illegal entry routes
46,497 arrivals were detected on illegal routes in 2025 — below the 2022 peak of 54,574, but 7% above 2024. Small boats now account for nearly nine in ten detections; clandestine entry through ports has almost disappeared.
Every person detected arriving in the UK by an illegal entry route, by how they arrived. Small boats are 73% of the eight-year total but were a small minority before 2020 — the other routes have shrunk as boats have grown.
View data table
| Year | Small boat arrivals | Inadequately documented air arrivals | Detected in the UK shortly after entry | Detected at UK ports |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 299 | 4,769 | 7,257 | 1,052 |
| 2019 | 1,843 | 5,237 | 8,492 | 959 |
| 2020 | 8,466 | 2,328 | 5,428 | 808 |
| 2021 | 28,526 | 2,561 | 5,036 | 662 |
| 2022 | 45,774 | 5,130 | 3,379 | 291 |
| 2023 | 29,437 | 3,854 | 2,836 | 236 |
| 2024 | 36,816 | 3,349 | 2,900 | 225 |
| 2025 | 41,472 | 3,027 | 1,817 | 181 |
These are detected arrival EVENTS on illegal entry routes — the best available official indicator, but not a count of illegal immigration. They exclude anyone who entered undetected, anyone who overstayed a visa, and anyone refused asylum who remains in the UK. The series begins in 2018; no comparable published series exists for earlier years, so no honest 15-year total can be built from it. Almost all small-boat arrivals go on to claim asylum, and 39% of initial decisions in the year to March 2026 were grants of protection — so a detected arrival is not the same as a person living here unlawfully. 2026 is excluded as only part-year data is published.
Source: Home Office, Illegal entry routes to the UK detailed dataset (YE March 2026), table IER_D01 · as of Calendar years 2018–2025 (2026 excluded — part-year only)
Legal and illegal migration are different measures
Coverage often runs the two together, or quotes one while describing the other. They come from separate official datasets, count different things, and are not two slices of one number. Here is what each one actually measures.
Legal migration
Arriving with permission: a visa granted before travel, a formal humanitarian scheme, or a right of entry (British and Irish citizens, EU nationals with settled status). In 2025 the Home Office issued 829,515 long-stay entry-clearance visas for work, study, family and other routes — plus a further 2.24 million short-stay visitor visas, which are not migration and are excluded throughout this page.
- Work visas: Skilled Worker, Health and Care Worker, Global Talent, seasonal worker — 261,112 entry-clearance work visas issued in 2025, plus dependants.
- Study visas: Sponsored student visas — 429,254 issued in 2025, the single largest long-stay route.
- Family visas: Spouses, partners, children and other dependants joining someone settled here — 66,610 in 2025.
- Humanitarian schemes: Ukraine schemes, the Hong Kong BN(O) route and UN refugee resettlement — people invited to come, arriving with permission already granted.
- Asylum granted after arrival: Someone who claims asylum and is recognised as a refugee is lawfully resident from that point, regardless of how they first arrived.
- Right of entry: British and Irish citizens, and EU nationals with settled or pre-settled status, need no visa at all — they are not counted as migrants entering illegally or legally by visa.
Illegal (irregular) entry
Arriving without permission — and, crucially, what the statistics capture is detected arrival events, not people living here illegally. Between 2018 and 2025 the Home Office recorded 264,447 detected arrivals via illegal routes, of which 192,633 (73%) were small boats.
- Small boat crossings: Crossing the Channel in an inflatable or other small vessel — 41,472 detected in 2025, 73% of all detected illegal arrivals since 2018.
- Inadequately documented air arrivals: Arriving at an airport without valid documents, often after destroying or never holding them — 3,027 in 2025.
- Detected in the UK after entry: Found inland shortly after entering clandestinely, typically concealed in a lorry — 1,817 in 2025, down sharply from 8,492 in 2019.
- Detected at UK ports: Discovered concealed in a vehicle or freight at the border itself — 181 in 2025.
- Visa overstaying (not in these figures): Entering lawfully and remaining after permission expires. Widely believed to be a large share of illegal residence, but it produces no arrival event, so it appears in none of the numbers on this page.
- Undetected entry (not in these figures): Anyone who entered without being caught is, by definition, absent from a dataset built from detections.
How someone entered does not fix their legal status
Almost everyone who arrives by small boat goes on to claim asylum. Of the initial decisions made in the year to March 2026, 39% were grants of refugee status or humanitarian protection — those people are then lawfully resident, however they arrived. Others are refused, and may appeal, be removed, or remain without status. Meanwhile the largest component of illegal residence is generally thought to be people who arrived perfectly legally on a visa and stayed after it expired — which generates no arrival event and appears nowhere in the figures above. "Arrived illegally" and "is here illegally" are different statements about different groups.
Where people come from, by route (2025)
The two columns are different datasets on different scales — compare the make-up of each, not the bar lengths across them. Legal long-stay arrivals are led by India, China and Pakistan; illegal-route arrivals are led by Eritrea, Iran, Afghanistan and Sudan. The two lists barely overlap. We do not attribute motive here: what the published data supports is that almost all arrivals on illegal routes go on to claim asylum, and that 39% of initial asylum decisions in the year to March 2026 were grants of refugee status or humanitarian protection. Grant rates vary substantially by nationality, and the Home Office publishes them by country.
Legal route: long-stay visas issued, 2025 (829,515 total)
- India159,383
- China102,588
- Pakistan58,440
- Nigeria51,874
- United States33,066
- Nepal26,949
- Philippines25,421
- Bangladesh17,937
- Ukraine17,117
- Kyrgyzstan12,872
Illegal route: detected arrivals, 2025 (46,497 total)
- Eritrea7,900
- Iran5,266
- Afghanistan4,917
- Sudan4,894
- Somalia3,876
- Iraq1,940
- Ethiopia1,833
- Syria1,630
- Stateless1,585
- Vietnam1,548
Illegal-route arrivals by nationality, cumulative 2018–2025
Detected arrivals 2018–2025 (264,447 total)
- Iran44,915
- Afghanistan31,395
- Iraq28,852
- Eritrea26,551
- Albania21,404
- Sudan19,644
- Syria16,937
- Vietnam9,477
- Turkey8,988
- Somalia5,877
That is an average of 33,056 a year across the eight full calendar years covered (2018 to 2025 inclusive) — though the year-by-year table above shows this was not a smooth trend: it peaked at 54,574 in 2022 before falling.
Sources: Home Office, Entry clearance visa outcomes detailed dataset (YE March 2026), table Vis_D02 (visitor visas excluded) and Home Office, Illegal entry routes to the UK detailed dataset (YE March 2026), table IER_D01. Both extracted directly from the published workbooks. Visa grants are counted by decision, so one person granted two visas in a year appears twice; detected arrivals are counted by event, so one person detected twice appears twice.
Set against every arrival at the UK border
The UK border handled 136.6 million passenger arrivals in 2025 — air, rail and sea combined. Detected illegal-route arrivals were 3.4 in every 10,000 of them, or one in roughly 2,900.
| Year | All passenger arrivals | Detected illegal-route arrivals | Per 10,000 arrivals | Equivalent to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 102,112,000 | 54,574 | 5.34 | 1 in 1,871 |
| 2023 | 123,094,000 | 36,363 | 2.95 | 1 in 3,385 |
| 2024 | 132,266,000 | 43,290 | 3.27 | 1 in 3,055 |
| 2025 | 136,553,000 | 46,497 | 3.41 | 1 in 2,937 |
Both columns count events, not people: someone who flies in six times is six arrivals, and someone detected twice is two detections — so the units match. What this is not is a share of migrants. The 136.6 million is overwhelmingly returning UK residents, tourists and business travellers, almost none of whom are migrating at all.
Why some people object to this comparison — and why we have kept it
A reasonable criticism of this table is that total passenger arrivals is not a meaningful denominator for irregular migration. Tourists and returning residents are not candidates for entering illegally, so dividing by them can make any number look negligible — and a ratio built on an unrelated denominator can mislead in exactly the way this site tries to avoid.
We have kept it because it answers one narrow, frequently asked question — how often a detection occurs relative to all crossings of the border — and because the border-security argument is partly about the capacity of that border to screen the traffic passing through it. But it is not evidence about the scale of illegal migration, the size of the unlawfully resident population, or the effectiveness of enforcement. If you want the scale question, read the detected-arrivals chart below on its own terms. Do not use this ratio to argue that irregular migration is either large or small.
Source: Home Office, Passenger arrivals summary tables (YE March 2026), table Arr_01. The table publishes monthly totals from January 2022, so earlier years are not available on the same basis; 2026 is excluded as part-year.
What these numbers cannot tell you
The illegal-entry figures on this page are the most reliable official measure available, but they are a best available indicator, not a count of illegal immigration. They exclude everyone who entered undetected, everyone who overstayed a visa, and everyone refused asylum who remains. The series only begins in 2018, so there is no comparable published run for the fifteen years before that.
No UK government has published an estimate of the illegally resident population since 2005, when the Home Office put it at roughly 430,000. In 2019 the ONS and Home Office said they had no plans to produce a new one, citing the methodological impossibility of counting a population that is actively avoiding detection. That gap now spans Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments — it reflects a measurement problem, not a political choice by any one party.
So when a precise total for "illegal immigration over the last 15 years" is quoted, it is doing one of three things: counting detected arrivals only (as this page does, and saying so), substituting asylum claims for illegal entry, or presenting a modelled estimate as a measurement. Ask which before accepting the number.
What the net figure alone doesn't show
171,000 is the number most headlines lead with. It is real, but it is one summary of a much larger, more varied set of flows.
Net migration is not immigration
Source: ONS, Long-term international migration, provisional (YE Dec 2025 edition, Tables 1 & 4b)
The latest figure is provisional, and revisions have been large
Source: ONS, Long-term international migration bulletin, YE December 2025
Net migration is not asylum, and it is not illegal entry
Source: ONS Table 4b; Home Office illegal entry routes dataset
The composition has changed more than the level, since Brexit
Source: ONS, Long-term international migration (Table 1)
What it means
- What the data directly shows
- Net migration fell sharply between YE Dec 2024 and YE Dec 2025 on the latest provisional estimate; gross immigration is far larger than the net figure; British and EU+ nationals show negative net migration; asylum is a minority of non-EU+ arrivals by reason.
- What can reasonably be inferred
- The fall in net migration is consistent with policy changes affecting work and study visa routes over the same period (see the 'what can change this' section below), though this page's data does not isolate how much of the fall each specific policy caused.
- What is disputed
- How much further net migration will fall, and whether the current level represents a new stable trend or a temporary adjustment, is disputed among analysts — this is a description of what has happened, not a forecast of what will happen next.
- A political judgement, not a finding
- What the 'right' level of net migration is, and which routes should be prioritised or restricted, are political choices this data does not settle.
- What the evidence cannot establish
- This data cannot establish the size of the UK's illegally resident population (no official estimate has been published since 2005), nor precisely how much of the net-migration fall is attributable to any single policy change versus other factors.
What can change this
Where there are meaningful policy levers on this picture — immigration policy is one of the more directly government-controlled areas on this site.
Work and study route eligibility rules
Current policySalary thresholds, dependant rules and course-eligibility rules for work and study visas directly affect the two largest components of non-EU+ arrivals by reason.
- Evidence:
- ONS Table 4b shows work and study together were the largest share of non-EU+ arrivals by reason in 2025, as charted above.
- Expected effect:
- Tightening eligibility reduces gross immigration on those specific routes; the scale of effect depends on the specific rule change.
- Time horizon:
- Months to a year, given visa processing and application-cycle lead times.
- Trade-offs:
- Work and study migrants contribute to specific sectors (e.g. NHS staffing, university funding) that this page does not separately quantify.
- Unknowns:
- How much any single rule change explains of the fall already observed between 2024 and 2025.
Asylum processing capacity and returns agreements
Current policyProcessing speed and returns agreements affect how quickly asylum claims are resolved and how many unsuccessful claimants are returned, though not the number of people arriving to claim asylum in the first place.
- Evidence:
- 39% of initial asylum decisions in the year to March 2026 were grants of protection, per the illegal-entry dataset caveat above.
- Expected effect:
- Faster processing and more returns would reduce the resident asylum-seeker population without necessarily reducing arrivals.
- Time horizon:
- Ongoing, dependent on processing capacity and international agreements.
- Trade-offs:
- Faster processing requires sustained investment in caseworker capacity; returns agreements require the cooperation of other states.
- Unknowns:
- This page does not separately track processing times or returns volumes as registry-verified figures.
Irregular-route deterrence and detection
Current policyBorder enforcement and deterrence measures aim to reduce detected illegal-route arrivals (46,497 in 2025), a small component of the total picture relative to gross immigration.
- Evidence:
- Home Office illegal entry routes dataset, as charted above.
- Expected effect:
- Even a large percentage change in detected irregular arrivals would be a small absolute change relative to gross immigration (813,000) — this page does not claim otherwise.
- Time horizon:
- Ongoing.
- Trade-offs:
- Enforcement measures do not address undetected entry or visa overstaying, the largest unmeasured components of irregular residence.
- Unknowns:
- No official estimate of the illegally resident population exists to measure total effect against.
What does immigration contribute — and what would cutting it change?
An interactive tool built on the OBR's published migration scenario: move a slider to cut annual net migration and see the modelled effect on tax receipts, public-service costs, borrowing and debt — alongside what migration currently contributes to the NHS, the workforce and the economy, and an honest account of the questions official data cannot answer.
Open the interactive tool →Local comparison
How this plays out locally
The national figures above are long-term international migration flows for the whole of the UK. This site does not currently carry a registry-verified local-authority breakdown of these flows on the same basis, so no local comparison is computed here rather than approximated from a different measure.
What is deliberately not published here
Earlier rounded comparisons of legal and irregular migration, workforce shares and fiscal effects have been withdrawn until each figure has a named primary dataset, matching period, geography, method and caveat.