Analysis
UK migration over time
Four counted things change the number of people in the United Kingdom: births, deaths, people arriving to stay a year or more, and people leaving for a year or more. The gap between arrivals and departures is called net migration.
Neither count goes back very far. Births and deaths have been counted across the whole United Kingdom since 1887. Arrivals and departures have been counted only since 1964. And the number of people living in the UK without permission has had no official estimate since the mid-2000s.
Drag the slider to move through the years. The first chart holds two lines: births minus deaths, and arrivals minus departures. Births and deaths have moved so close together that almost all of the change in the population now comes from the migration side. The bar under it marks the same year against the whole population, at the same size.
One thing to carry through the page: the way migration is counted changed twice while the numbers were rising. Square markers show where the counting changed. Round markers show where something happened.
The two halves of population change
This choice, and the year on the slider, drive all three charts on this page.
United Kingdom · calendar years · people a year · the line at zero is where as many left as arrived
A line chart showing that the gap between births and deaths has closed to near zero since the 1970s while net migration has become much the larger figure.
- Net migration (arrivals minus departures)
- Births minus deaths
- Total population (right-hand scale)
Right-hand scale: total population on 30 June
The faint, thinner line is the old survey count of net migration, which stops in 2019. From 2012 a second count built from records runs alongside it, and the two disagree: for 2019 the survey said 313,000 and the records said 184,000.
- Something happened — tap a dot to read it
- The way migration was counted changed here
Births minus deaths −942 — more deaths than births
Population on 30 June: 69.5 million
Drag the slider to move through the years.
The same year, set against everyone already in the UK
United Kingdom · the whole bar is the population on 30 June · the marked sliver at its right edge is that year's net migration
171,000 — about 0.25% of the 69,487,000 people already in the UK. More people arrived than left.
Arrivals and departures
United Kingdom · calendar years · people a year · drawn to its own scale
A line chart showing United Kingdom arrivals and departures both reaching record highs in the 2020s, on two counts that are not joined to each other.
- Arrivals
- Departures
- Labour
- Conservative
- Coalition
A government being in office is not proof it caused a change. The Office for National Statistics and the Migration Observatory both state that several causes usually act at once. The biggest moves here line up with the 2004 EU enlargement, the end of free movement and the visa routes opened after it — not with a change of governing party.
The shaded years are when an EU citizen needed no visa to come. Free movement ended on 31 December 2020. The faint, thinner lines are the old survey count, which stops in 2019; from 2012 a second count built from records runs alongside it, and the two disagree — in 2019 the survey put net migration at 313,000 and the records at 184,000.
Births and deaths
United Kingdom · calendar years · people a year · drawn to its own scale
A line chart showing United Kingdom births falling and deaths rising until the two lines meet, on figures summed on this page from three national registrars after 2021.
- Births
- Deaths
- Children per woman (right-hand scale)
- Replacement level, 2.1 children (dashed)
Right-hand scale: children per woman, dashed line at 2.1 replaces a generation
Fertility fell below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman in 1973, and below 2.0 in 1974. It has never returned to replacement since. Births and deaths were counted separately in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The official United Kingdom total stops at 2021, so figures from 2022 on are added up on this page from the three national counts. That method matches the official totals exactly for every year from 2018 to 2021. The lowest year in the official series is 1977, at 657,038 births.
The same twelve months, counted again
Net migration for the twelve months ending June 2023 has been published six times. The first answer and the latest answer are 252,000 apart. Nothing about those twelve months changed. The counting did.
- 23 November 2023672,000
- 23 May 2024740,000
- 28 November 2024906,000
- 22 May 2025906,000
- 27 November 2025924,000
- 21 May 2026924,000
The Office for National Statistics states that its recent figures are provisional and will change again. Every figure on this page for 2024 and 2025 carries that same warning.
Coming to the UK without permission
Five questions, answered with the numbers that exist.
1. How big is it?
In 2025, 46,497 people were caught arriving by every irregular route added together. In the same year 813,000 people arrived to stay.
That is about 5.7% of everyone who arrived.
2. Do they all come by small boat?
No. Boats are the newest route, not the only one — and not the oldest. Back in 2018 the main way in was hidden in a lorry or at a port. Boats barely existed.
2018
- Small boat299
- Lorry or port1,052
- Found inland7,257
- By air, no papers4,769
2025
- Small boat41,472
- Lorry or port181
- Found inland1,817
- By air, no papers3,027
The routes swapped over. They did not add up. People caught at ports fell from 1,052 to 181, and people found inland fell from 7,257 to 1,817, over the same years that boats rose. The Migration Observatory puts that down to British and French border spending after 2014, which made lorry and train journeys much harder. Coming to the UK without permission is not new, and it did not start with boats.
3. How did people claiming asylum actually get here?
Most did not come by boat. Boats are the largest single route, but only just — almost as many flew in legally on a visa and claimed afterwards. Ordered largest first.
- Small boat41,262
- Arrived legally, on a visa39,095
- Another way9,078
- Hidden in a lorry or at a port6,968
- Arrived without papers4,222
In 2018 the picture was different again: 15,200 came hidden in lorries or at ports, against 360 by boat.
4. Why do people claim asylum, and who are they?
Asylum is the legal right to ask a country for protection because it is not safe to go home. It is set out in the 1951 Refugee Convention, which Britain signed. Claiming it is lawful, however a person arrived. These were the five countries most people came from in 2025.
- Eritrea7,602
One of the world's most repressive states, with open-ended forced conscription
- Afghanistan4,755
Under Taliban rule since 2021
- Iran4,489
Political and religious persecution
- Sudan4,432
Civil war since 2023
- Somalia3,783
Decades of conflict and famine
Whether a claim is accepted is decided case by case. Of every asylum claim decided between 2018 and 2025, 52% were granted protection at the first decision and 48% were refused. For people who arrived by small boat the grant rate was higher, at about 60%. So roughly half of all claims are found to be genuine and roughly half are not — the honest answer is that it is close to an even split, and no single word covers everyone.
Left: granted protection. Right: refused. First decisions, 2018 to 2025.
About 93% of people arriving by small boat go on to claim asylum. In 2025, of 40,243 boat arrivals matched to a record, 496 — 1.2% — made no claim of any kind.
5. Do any of them leave again?
Two different things get counted here, over two different periods. They are not the same figure and cannot be added together.
Small boat arrivals, 2018 to the end of 2025
7,500
returned, out of 192,633 who arrived that way over those eight years — about 3.9%, or one in twenty-five.
Everyone returned, in the single year 2025
39,371
of whom 27,371 left of their own accord and 12,000 were removed. This counts people who arrived by every route, not only by boat.
Returning someone depends on their home country agreeing to take them back. Most small boat arrivals returned so far went to Albania, where such an agreement exists. Where there is no agreement, or where the country is judged unsafe to return to, a return is far harder to arrange.
What nobody can tell you. There is no official count of how many people are living in the UK without permission. The Home Office has published no estimate since the mid-2000s and states that it does not produce one. Returns figures record only whether someone had claimed asylum or was a foreign national offender, so they cannot be used to work out who is in the UK without permission. The routes above are not counted in the same way as each other, so the total is a sum of detections, not of people, and the asylum route-of-entry table is marked by the Home Office as not accredited official statistics.
The figures behind these charts
| Year | Births | Deaths | Births minus deaths | Births per 1,000 | Deaths per 1,000 | Net migration | Count | Population |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1964 | 1,014,672 | 611,130 | 403,542 | 18.8 | 11.3 | −60,000 | survey | 53,990,800 |
| 1965 | 997,275 | 627,798 | 369,477 | 18.3 | 11.6 | −78,000 | survey | 54,349,500 |
| 1966 | 979,587 | 643,754 | 335,833 | 17.9 | 11.8 | −82,000 | survey | 54,642,700 |
| 1967 | 961,800 | 616,710 | 345,090 | 17.5 | 11.2 | −84,000 | survey | 54,959,000 |
| 1968 | 947,231 | 655,998 | 291,233 | 17.2 | 11.9 | −56,000 | survey | 55,213,500 |
| 1969 | 920,256 | 659,537 | 260,719 | 16.6 | 11.9 | −87,000 | survey | 55,460,600 |
| 1970 | 903,907 | 655,385 | 248,522 | 16.2 | 11.8 | −65,000 | survey | 55,632,200 |
| 1971 | 901,648 | 645,078 | 256,570 | 16.1 | 11.5 | −40,000 | survey | 55,928,000 |
| 1972 | 833,984 | 673,938 | 160,046 | 14.9 | 12.0 | −11,000 | survey | 56,096,700 |
| 1973 | 779,545 | 669,692 | 109,853 | 13.9 | 11.9 | −50,000 | survey | 56,222,900 |
| 1974 | 737,138 | 667,359 | 69,779 | 13.1 | 11.9 | −85,000 | survey | 56,235,600 |
| 1975 | 697,518 | 662,477 | 35,041 | 12.4 | 11.8 | −41,000 | survey | 56,225,700 |
| 1976 | 675,526 | 680,799 | −5,273 | 12.0 | 12.1 | −19,000 | survey | 56,216,100 |
| 1977 | 657,038 | 655,143 | 1,895 | 11.7 | 11.7 | −46,000 | survey | 56,189,900 |
| 1978 | 686,952 | 667,177 | 19,775 | 12.2 | 11.9 | −5,000 | survey | 56,178,000 |
| 1979 | 734,572 | 675,576 | 58,996 | 13.1 | 12.0 | 6,000 | survey | 56,240,100 |
| 1980 | 753,708 | 661,519 | 92,189 | 13.4 | 11.7 | −55,000 | survey | 56,329,700 |
| 1981 | 730,712 | 657,974 | 72,738 | 13.0 | 11.7 | −79,000 | survey | 56,357,500 |
| 1982 | 718,999 | 662,801 | 56,198 | 12.8 | 11.8 | −56,000 | survey | 56,290,700 |
| 1983 | 721,238 | 659,101 | 62,137 | 12.8 | 11.7 | 17,000 | survey | 56,315,700 |
| 1984 | 729,401 | 644,918 | 84,483 | 12.9 | 11.4 | 37,000 | survey | 56,409,300 |
| 1985 | 750,520 | 670,656 | 79,864 | 13.3 | 11.9 | 58,000 | survey | 56,554,000 |
| 1986 | 754,805 | 660,735 | 94,070 | 13.3 | 11.7 | 37,000 | survey | 56,683,800 |
| 1987 | 775,405 | 644,342 | 131,063 | 13.7 | 11.3 | 2,000 | survey | 56,804,000 |
| 1988 | 787,303 | 649,178 | 138,125 | 13.8 | 11.4 | −21,000 | survey | 56,916,400 |
| 1989 | 777,036 | 657,733 | 119,303 | 13.6 | 11.5 | 44,000 | survey | 57,076,500 |
| 1990 | 798,364 | 641,799 | 156,565 | 13.9 | 11.2 | 36,000 | survey | 57,237,500 |
| 1991 | 792,269 | 646,181 | 146,088 | 13.8 | 11.2 | 44,000 | survey | 57,438,700 |
| 1992 | 780,799 | 634,238 | 146,561 | 13.6 | 11.0 | −13,000 | survey | 57,584,500 |
| 1993 | 761,526 | 658,194 | 103,332 | 13.2 | 11.4 | −1,000 | survey | 57,713,900 |
| 1994 | 750,480 | 626,222 | 124,258 | 13.0 | 10.8 | 77,000 | survey | 57,862,100 |
| 1995 | 731,882 | 641,712 | 90,170 | 12.6 | 11.1 | 76,000 | survey | 58,024,800 |
| 1996 | 733,163 | 638,879 | 94,284 | 12.6 | 11.0 | 55,000 | survey | 58,164,400 |
| 1997 | 726,622 | 632,517 | 94,105 | 12.6 | 10.8 | 48,000 | survey | 58,314,200 |
| 1998 | 716,888 | 627,592 | 89,296 | 12.3 | 10.7 | 140,000 | survey | 58,474,900 |
| 1999 | 699,976 | 629,476 | 70,500 | 11.9 | 10.7 | 163,000 | survey | 58,684,400 |
| 2000 | 679,029 | 610,579 | 68,450 | 11.5 | 10.4 | 158,000 | survey | 58,886,100 |
| 2001 | 669,123 | 604,393 | 64,730 | 11.3 | 10.2 | 179,000 | survey | 59,113,016 |
| 2002 | 668,777 | 608,045 | 60,732 | 11.3 | 10.2 | 172,000 | survey | 59,365,677 |
| 2003 | 695,549 | 612,085 | 83,464 | 11.7 | 10.3 | 185,000 | survey | 59,636,662 |
| 2004 | 715,996 | 584,791 | 131,205 | 11.9 | 9.8 | 268,000 | survey | 59,950,364 |
| 2005 | 722,549 | 582,964 | 139,585 | 12.0 | 9.6 | 267,000 | survey | 60,413,276 |
| 2006 | 748,563 | 572,224 | 176,339 | 12.3 | 9.4 | 265,000 | survey | 60,826,967 |
| 2007 | 772,245 | 574,687 | 197,558 | 12.6 | 9.4 | 273,000 | survey | 61,319,075 |
| 2008 | 794,383 | 579,697 | 214,686 | 12.8 | 9.4 | 229,000 | survey | 61,823,772 |
| 2009 | 790,204 | 559,617 | 230,587 | 12.7 | 9.0 | 229,000 | survey | 62,260,486 |
| 2010 | 807,271 | 561,666 | 245,605 | 12.9 | 8.9 | 256,000 | survey | 62,759,456 |
| 2011 | 807,776 | 552,232 | 255,544 | 12.8 | 8.7 | 205,000 | survey | 63,285,145 |
| 2012 | 812,970 | 569,024 | 243,946 | 12.8 | 8.9 | 195,000 | records | 63,710,543 |
| 2013 | 778,803 | 576,458 | 202,345 | 12.1 | 9.0 | 244,000 | records | 64,138,221 |
| 2014 | 776,352 | 570,341 | 206,011 | 12.0 | 8.8 | 284,000 | records | 64,618,693 |
| 2015 | 777,165 | 602,782 | 174,383 | 11.9 | 9.3 | 303,000 | records | 65,086,958 |
| 2016 | 774,835 | 597,206 | 177,629 | 11.8 | 9.1 | 249,000 | records | 65,605,841 |
| 2017 | 755,042 | 607,172 | 147,870 | 11.4 | 9.2 | 208,000 | records | 65,964,292 |
| 2018 | 731,213 | 616,014 | 115,199 | 11.0 | 9.3 | 276,000 | records | 66,286,727 |
| 2019 | 712,680 | 604,707 | 107,973 | 10.7 | 9.1 | 184,000 | records | 66,627,507 |
| 2020 | 681,560 | 689,629 | −8,069 | 10.2 | 10.3 | 93,000 | records | 66,739,867 |
| 2021 | 694,685 | 667,479 | 27,206 | 10.4 | 10.0 | 467,000 | records | 66,977,988 |
| 2022 | 673,275 | 657,260 | 16,015 | 10.0 | 9.7 | 891,000 | records | 67,636,134 |
| 2023 | 656,969 | 662,062 | −5,093 | 9.6 | 9.7 | 848,000 | records | 68,526,183 |
| 2024 | 659,856 | 648,954 | 10,902 | 9.5 | 9.4 | 331,000 | records | 69,281,437 |
| 2025 | 649,526 | 650,468 | −942 | 9.3 | 9.4 | 171,000 | records | 69,487,000 |
Where these numbers come from
Office for National Statistics. Office for National Statistics, 'Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2025', published 21 May 2026. Tables 1 and 4b. ONS
Office for National Statistics. Office for National Statistics, 'Long-Term International Migration 2.00, citizenship, UK, time series 1964 to 2019'. Estimates rounded to the nearest thousand. ONS
Office for National Statistics. Office for National Statistics, 'Estimating UK international migration: 2012 to 2021', published 23 November 2023. ONS
Office for National Statistics. Office for National Statistics, 'Vital statistics in the UK: births, deaths and marriages', released 24 February 2023, worksheets 2 and 3. Figures from 2022 onwards are summed on this page from the three national registrars. ONS
Office for National Statistics. Office for National Statistics, 'Population estimates for the UK, mid-1851 to mid-2024', Table 1. The mid-2025 figure is provisional. ONS
Home Office. Home Office, 'Irregular migration to the UK, year ending December 2025' and the immigration system statistics data tables. Home Office
The Migration Observatory, University of Oxford. The Migration Observatory, University of Oxford, 'Long-term international migration flows to and from the UK' and 'EU migration to and from the UK'. Migration Observatory
House of Commons Library. House of Commons Library research briefings on immigration legislation and migration statistics. Commons Library
What this page does not do. It does not say whether any of these numbers is good or bad, and it names no party. Events are marked where they happened, but a marker is not proof that an event caused the change beside it — the Office for National Statistics and the Migration Observatory both state that several causes usually act at once.Where these numbers come from.