Migration

International statistics often define an immigrant as someone who was born in a country different from the one they now live in. This is the case regardless of whether they have citizenship in their new country, or not.

What share of the UK population was born abroad?

As the chart below shows, around 17% of the population in 2024 was born overseas. This share has almost tripled since 1990.

Note that this data comes from the United Nations' international dataset (which is useful for cross-country comparisons). The UN's figure for the UK is a little lower than ONS's own estimate (which was 18% to 19% in 2024) because of differences in methods and timing.

Does the UK have more or fewer immigrants relative to other countries?

The chart shows the foreign-born share across a selection of high-income countries. At 17%, the UK is roughly middle of the pack.

Its share is higher than in France, the US and Denmark, but lower than other countries including Spain, Sweden, Canada and Australia.

On Our World in Data, you can explore these comparisons over time, and across a wider range of countries.

The change in the domestic population through migration is determined by how many people move to the UK (immigration) and how many leave (emigration).

How many people are moving to the UK, and how many are leaving? Both flows are shown in the chart below. Provisional estimates for 2025 estimate that around 800,000 people moved to the UK, and around 640,000 people left.

This follows a peak in immigration in 2023 at 1.44 million.

Emigration has increased in recent years, partly because many of the people who came to study after the pandemic have since left.

The balance of the two metrics we just looked at — immigrants and emigrants — determines net migration. This is the net change in the population through migration.

Net migration numbers are shown in the chart. In 2025, provisional estimates suggest that 171,000 more people came to the UK than left.

For most of the 1960s and 70s, and the early 1980s, more people left the UK than arrived. Net migration became consistently positive in the mid-1990s and was typically between 150,000 and 300,000 a year through the 2000s and 2010s.

It then rose to its highest levels after the pandemic, peaking at almost 1 million in the 12 months to March 2023, before falling sharply.

Over this time, the UK's population has also grown. It's therefore useful to look at net migration relative to the size of the population.

This chart shows the net migration rate, which is measured per 1,000 people living in the UK.

In 2025, this was around 2.5 per 1,000 people — this means the net change in the UK population was an increase of 0.25%.

In 2022, this peaked at 13 per 1,000 (a net increase of 1.3% of the population).

The data on net migration we've just looked at gives us perspective over the last 50 years.

But we can zoom out to look at estimates over centuries, to get a more complete picture of how things have changed. The chart shows net migration into England since 1541, followed by the same metric for the UK as a whole, since the 1800s.

What we see is that the UK's history of migration is mostly one of emigration: for centuries, more people were leaving than arriving. This transition to net immigration is a relatively recent change, with more people consistently arriving than leaving, over just the last three decades.

The geographical composition of migration has changed over time. In the 2010s, EU nationals were the largest contributors to net migration.

After the Brexit referendum, and after free movement ended in 2021, net EU migration fell. Since 2022, more EU nationals have left the UK than arrived.

Over the same period, net migration of non-EU nationals rose to over one million in 2023. British nationals have consistently had negative net migration: more British people leave each year than return.

You can use the buttons on the chart to switch between immigration, emigration and net migration.

What about specific nationalities? What countries do people come from?

India is by far the largest source of non-EU immigration, with 139,000 Indian nationals moving to the UK in 2025, most of them to study.

Pakistan, China and Nigeria follow. For most of the top nationalities, study is now the main reason for coming.

For non-EU nationals, the ONS estimates the reason for migrating based on the visa they arrived on.

Work and study have been the main drivers of the post-pandemic rise. Work-related immigration peaked at 471,000 in 2023, boosted by the Health and Care Worker visa, before falling to 146,000 in 2025 after the government tightened the rules.

Humanitarian routes — mainly the Ukraine schemes and the British National (Overseas) route for people from Hong Kong — added 190,000 people in 2022.

Many people on work and study visas bring family members with them; these are known as dependants. At the peak in 2023, dependants made up around half of all work-related immigration.

From January 2024 most international students could no longer bring dependants, and from March 2024 care workers lost the same right. Study dependants fell from 133,000 in 2023 to 17,000 in 2025.

Home Office visa statistics are published every quarter and give an early signal of where migration is heading.

Work visas, including dependants, more than tripled between 2019 and 2023, to 614,000, before falling to 260,000 in 2025. Study visas have stayed at around 400,000 a year, but study dependant visas fell from over 100,000 to around 20,000 after the 2024 rule change.

Visa numbers are higher than ONS's immigration estimates, because not everyone granted a visa comes to the UK, and some visas are for stays shorter than a year.

People who claim asylum are applying for protection because they fear persecution in their home country. In 2025, 82,600 main applicants claimed asylum in the UK, or 101,900 when family members are included on their claims.

That is close to the previous peak in 2002. Claims fell to below 20,000 a year around 2010, before rising from the late 2010s.

The share of initial decisions that granted protection rose to 76% in 2022, then fell to 42% in 2025.

Since 2018, a growing number of people have crossed the English Channel in small boats. Arrivals rose from 299 in 2018 to 45,774 in 2022.

After falling to 29,437 in 2023, they rose again to 41,472 in 2025.

Using the options on the chart, you can see this data across different measures: by calendar year, by month, and a rolling 12-month total, which captures increases or declines before having to wait for a final estimate for the entire calendar year.

The second chart shows small boat arrivals as a share of all immigration into the UK each year. In recent years, this has been in the range of 2% to 5%.

When asylum seekers arrive in the UK, what type of accomodation do they stay in?

Roughly two-thirds live in dispersal accommodation, which are designated flats or houses, within local communities.

Recently, a lot of attention has been on hotels; these make up the majority of the final third, with around 20,000 to 40,000 being temporarily housed there in recent years.

Note that prior to late 2022, hotels and short-term accommodation weren't counted separately; so prior to December 2022, they are combined into a different category.

How do rates of asylum seekers and refugees (who have had their applications processed, and been granted right to stay) in the UK compare to other countries?

In the chart, you can see the number of refugees per 1,000 people in a population across a range of countries.

At 8 per 1,000 (or 0.8%), the UK has relatively low rates. It's around half the rate of countries like Denmark, Greece and the Netherlands, and a third of countries like Switzerland, Turkey, Austria and Germany.

Using the button of the chart, you can see these rates for asylum seekers. On this, the UK is close to the middle of the distribution.

The share of the UK population born abroad has more than doubled since 1990, from 6% to 17% in 2024.

Over the same period, violent crime has fallen. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, the share of adults who were victims of violence fell from 4.7% in 1995 to 1.3% in the year to March 2026.

ONS counts someone as a long-term international migrant if they change their country of usual residence for at least 12 months. Short visits — tourism, business trips, or seasonal work of less than a year — are not included.

Until 2019, ONS estimates relied mainly on the International Passenger Survey, which interviewed a sample of people at ports and airports. It had large margins of error and is now known to have undercounted some groups, particularly EU migrants in the 2010s.

ONS now uses administrative data — Home Office visa and travel records, and tax and benefits data — and has re-estimated migration back to 2012 on this basis. That is why the long-run charts on this page have a break between 2011 and 2012.

Recent estimates are provisional and often revised substantially, because ONS needs to observe people for a full year to confirm that they are long-term migrants. For example, the first estimate of net migration for the year ending June 2023 was 672,000; it was later revised up to over 900,000.