The claim: Asylum hotels cost £8 million a day.

Misuse

a figure from a past year repeated as current, and hotels read as the whole bill

Direction

restrictionist

What the data says

The Home Office publishes two daily averages, and they are a year apart. Its accounts for 2024-25 put average spending on asylum hotels at £5.77 million a day, and give the previous year, 2023-24, as £8.3 million a day. Both figures are the department's own, stated in the same sentence as the annual totals they come from. Nothing on this page divides an annual figure by 365 to reach a daily one.

The annual hotel figure behind them is £2.1 billion for 2024-25, again from the Home Office's accounts. The National Audit Office separately puts Home Office spending on asylum accommodation and support at £3.4 billion and government spending on the asylum system as a whole at £4.9 billion, covering the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice and excluding what falls on local authorities. The NAO's accommodation and support figure is a subset of its own system total. The hotel figure is the Home Office's, lifted out of a different aggregate in the accounts, and no publisher places it inside either of the other two.

Hotels also house a minority of the people being accommodated. As at 30 June 2026, fifteen months later than the spending figures above, there were 16,021 people in hotel accommodation and 89,089 in asylum accommodation of all kinds, so fewer than a quarter of them were in hotels. That second total is this site's sum of the Home Office's two published components rather than a figure the Home Office states.

Why the claim is misleading

The figure describes a financial year that ended in March 2024. Repeated today it is a statement about the past offered as a statement about now. The Home Office's average for the year after it is lower, and the two sit on the same page of the same document, so the newer figure is no harder to find than the older one. This is the error the claim runs on: not an invented number, but a real number that has been overtaken and is still circulating.

Hotels are one line in the bill and not the bill. The hotel figure is a Home Office figure of £2.1 billion, and the asylum system total is a National Audit Office figure of £4.9 billion. They come from different publishers counting different things, so a version of the claim that means the whole system is not the same claim at all, and a reader cannot tell which is meant from the phrase alone.

No publisher states a daily average for the asylum system. The accounts state one for hotels, and that is the only daily figure on this subject with a publisher behind it. Any "£X million a day" applied to the whole system is somebody's division of an annual total, which is worth knowing before repeating it. The site's own page on what the asylum system costs gives that total per year and leaves the division to whoever wants to do it.

And a daily figure ages faster than the annual one it comes from. It is quoted in the present tense, it sounds like a running meter, and nothing in the phrasing carries the year. That is why this claim has outlived the year it belongs to.

What the claim gets right

The number was real, and it was official. About £8 million a day is close to the Home Office's own published average for 2023-24. Someone repeating it in 2024 was quoting the department rather than estimating, and the correction here is a date, not an accusation of invention. The number of people in asylum hotels peaked in September 2023, inside that financial year, and is far below that peak now. That is a headcount rather than a cost: this page holds no hotel spending figure earlier than 2023-24, so it cannot say which year spending was highest.

Hotels are the expensive form of accommodation. In the three months to June 2023 a hotel place cost about £158 per person per night against about £20 for dispersal accommodation, on the Home Office's own business case. That gap is a large part of why hotel accommodation costs what it does, alongside the number of people housed and the mix of accommodation. Both rates are approximate and three years old, and what the asylum system costs carries a later estimate of each.

And the sums involved are large on any reading. Whichever of these figures a reader means, it is billions a year. Nothing here is an argument that the cost is small.

The mirror claim fails too

"Asylum hotel costs have come down, so the figure no longer matters" makes the same mistake in the other direction. £5.77 million a day is itself an average for a financial year that ended in March 2025, and it will date exactly as its predecessor did. The answer to a stale figure is a dated one, not a permanent one. Both versions work by treating a figure for a named year as a standing fact about the present.

Better questions to ask

• Which financial year is it? The claim's own figure is close for one year and high for the next.
• Hotels, accommodation and support, or the whole system? Three different totals, and only the first is what "hotels" means.
• Whose figure is it? The hotel totals are the Home Office's, the system total is the National Audit Office's, and they are built on different aggregates.
• Is the daily figure published, or divided? The accounts state one for hotels; nobody states one for the system.
• How many people, and in what kind of accommodation? Cost per night and number of places are what move a hotel bill.

Source notes

Hotel spending and both daily averages: Home Office, Annual Report and Accounts 2024-25, HC 1133, page 75, published 17 July 2025. The department states both averages itself.

Asylum accommodation and support, and the asylum system total: National Audit Office, An analysis of the asylum system, published 10 December 2025. Home Office and Ministry of Justice only. The NAO states that it does not capture all costs, particularly those falling on local authorities.

Cost per person per night: Home Office April 2024 business case, quoted in the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, An inspection of contingency asylum accommodation, paragraph 5.14. Approximate, for the three months to June 2023, and the oldest figures on this page.

People in accommodation: Home Office, immigration system statistics, year ending June 2026. The hotel count is published; the accommodation total is this site's sum of the two components the Home Office publishes, hotel accommodation and other accommodation. It is not the support total, which also includes people receiving subsistence only.

This page forms no share out of a hotel figure and a system figure. The hotel total comes from the Home Office's accounts and the system total from the NAO, on aggregates that are not built to nest, and neither publisher places one inside the other. Where this site does set them out as nested, on what the asylum system costs, it says on that page that the nesting is its own construction.

All common claims