What the asylum system costs

Two different questions get called "the cost of immigration" and they need separating before any figure means anything.

• What the system spends

  Published, sourced, and reasonably firm. That is this page.

• What migration is worth fiscally

  Contested and method-dependent, with no agreed figure: in the pre-Brexit studies the estimated effect is small in magnitude and differs in sign between them. Not this page, see the full check on whether immigrants pay more than they cost.

A spending total tells you what a system costs to run. It tells you nothing about the net fiscal position of migrants generally, and it is not evidence for or against that question. The two get conflated constantly, in both directions.

The total

The National Audit Office puts government spending on the asylum system at £4.9 billion in financial year 2024-25, covering the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

The NAO is explicit that this does not capture all costs, particularly those falling on local authorities. It is a floor, not a ceiling.

Where it goes

These figures are nested, not parallel. Hotel spending sits inside accommodation spending, which sits inside the total. Setting them side by side as though they were separate items would double-count.

The nesting is this site's own construction. The two totals are the NAO's and the hotel figure is the Home Office's, from its annual accounts, and neither publisher places one figure inside the other. The hotel figure does fit inside the accommodation total, but it is lifted out of a different aggregate: in the accounts it sits inside a larger asylum support total of their own, and the NAO's total excludes unaccompanied asylum-seeking children where the accounts do not say whether this figure does.

Why hotels dominate the bill

Hotels accounted for about 76% of the cost of the accommodation contracts, £1.3 billion of an estimated £1.7 billion in the first seven months of 2024-25, and housed about 35% of the people in asylum accommodation (National Audit Office, HC 874, paragraphs 1.18 and 1.14). The report puts those two percentages in one sentence, and they are different kinds of measure: the 76% is a share of spending across the first seven months of that financial year, while the 35% is a headcount on a single day, 1 January 2025, after that window had closed. Hotels are disproportionately expensive, which is what the pair is here to show, and the nightly rate below is the direct evidence for it. The two percentages themselves are not on the same basis.

These rates are approximate and change over time. A later Home Office estimate put a hotel place at £144.98 and a dispersal place at £23.25 per person per night as of June 2025 (House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, HC 580), so the gap has narrowed but not closed.

On "£8 million a day"

Daily figures circulate widely and are worth checking rather than repeating, because they go out of date faster than anything else on this subject.

Hotel spending of £2.1 billion is £5.77 million a day in the accounts' own terms. The previous year's figure of about £3 billion is £8.3 million a day, again the accounts' figure rather than ours.

A newer annual report exists and these figures are not out of date. The Home Office Annual Report and Accounts 2025-26, published on 14 July 2026, was checked against them on 10 August 2026 and publishes no hotel spending total and no daily average at all. The figures above are therefore the latest the department has published on hotels, not the latest it published before we stopped looking.

So a widely repeated "£8 million a day" was approximately right for hotel spending in 2023-24, and is above the current figure rather than at it. Whether any particular version of the claim is accurate depends on which year it describes, and whether it means hotels or the whole system. The whole system costs £4.9 billion a year, and no publisher states a daily average for it: any per-day figure for the whole system is somebody's division, including ours if we did it.

Three numbers, all defensible, all describing different things. Ask which year and which category before repeating any of them.

The contracts are costing far more than planned

The three asylum accommodation contracts running from 2019 to 2029 are now projected to cost £15.3 billion over their lifetime, more than three times the original estimate of about £4.5 billion.

This is a projection across a ten-year contract period, not an annual figure, and it must not be compared with the annual figures above.

What this page leaves out, and why

Immigration fee income. The Home Office collected around £3.6 billion in visa and immigration fees and about £2.3 billion from the Immigration Health Surcharge. Both come from the Home Office's own annual accounts, and this site rounds or sums each rather than finding it printed as one number, which is why they are given as approximations. They are the financial year 2025-26 and the spending figures above are 2024-25, because the 2025-26 accounts restate the income and publish no hotel spending total, no per-day rate and no unit cost, so the two sides of this page are a year apart and must not be subtracted. They are also immigration-wide figures rather than asylum ones, so they were never a matched pair with the spending above on population either. Setting them against asylum spending to show the system "pays for itself" would compare two different populations, and it is the same category error this site corrects elsewhere.

Cost per person as a measure of worth. The nightly accommodation rates above are procurement figures, what the government pays for a bed. This site does not publish a cost per asylum seeker, because dividing a system's running costs by the number of people in it produces a number that looks like a person's value and is not.

The fiscal impact question. Deferred to a later phase, and it needs a page about method rather than a page of figures.

Claims that rest on these figures

Each of these checks uses at least one figure from this page. They are the same figures, read against a sentence somebody is circulating.

• Immigrants pay more in tax than they cost. Misuse: contested, method-dependent estimate stated as settled fact
• Immigrants are a drain on the public finances. Misuse: contested, method-dependent estimate stated as settled fact
• Asylum hotels cost £8 million a day. Misuse: a figure from a past year repeated as current, and hotels read as the whole bill
• The average migrant contributes £341,000 over their lifetime. Misuse: an illustration for one modelled individual read as a typical outcome, with an unstated endpoint age doing the arithmetic

Every figure on this page

How every figure here is sourced and recorded.

This page was last reviewed on 27 July 2026. Its figures are not a live count; they were all checked against their sources on 11 August 2026.