Returns
Returns count departures, not people, and the categories do not nest. Adding them together is the commonest way this figure is made to say something it does not say.
A return is a departure from the UK by someone with no right to remain. The Home Office publishes several counts of them, on different bases, and they are among the easiest figures on this subject to add up wrongly. Two things decide almost every misreading.
They count events, not people. One person returned twice appears twice. No published figure here is a headcount of individuals, so "40,605 people were returned" is not a claim any of these numbers supports, however often the total is written that way.
The categories do not nest. One of them is published separately from the headline total on purpose, and one is a subset of it. Neither can be added to it.
What the Home Office publishes
| Count | Latest figure | How it relates to the total |
|---|---|---|
| Enforced returns | 9,669 returns | Carried out by the state. Part of the total below |
| Voluntary returns | 30,936 returns | Not carried out by the state. Part of the total below, and about three-quarters of it |
| Enforced plus voluntary | 40,605 returns | The headline total. The two rows above, and nothing else |
| Refused entry at port | 18,646 returns | Separate. Published outside the total and must not be added to it |
| Asylum-related returns | 12,568 returns | A subset. Already inside the total, not an addition to it |
Only the first two rows sum to the third. Someone who adds the port refusals to the headline total produces a larger number that the Home Office does not publish and that counts two different things at once. Someone who adds the asylum-related figure counts part of the total twice.
Why port refusals are not returns in the usual sense
A person refused entry at the border has not been living in the UK and is not being removed from it. They are being turned away at the point of arrival. The Home Office counts this separately for that reason, and this site holds the figure specifically so that the separation is visible rather than assumed. It is 18,646 for the year ending June 2026, and it belongs beside the returns total rather than inside it.
Only some returns are asylum-related
Of the headline total, 12,568 were asylum-related: people whose asylum claim had been refused, withdrawn or otherwise concluded. The rest involve people with no asylum claim at all, such as visa overstayers and people refused permission to stay after entering. A returns total is not an asylum statistic, and one quoted in an argument about asylum is describing a larger population than the argument is about.
What these figures cannot tell you
They do not say how many individuals left, because they count events. And they do not say how many people who should have left did not, because the denominator that question needs is not published. The Home Office does not estimate it and says so in terms: “It is not possible to know the exact number of people currently resident in the UK without permission, nor the total number of people who enter the UK irregularly, and so we do not seek to make any official estimates of the illegal population.” Independent researchers have produced estimates, which the Migration Observatory collects and warns are “highly uncertain and have large margins of error”. The most widely quoted of them was retracted in March 2025 and revised downwards, which is worth knowing if you have met it in an argument.
Nor do the returns figures measure enforcement effort against any total: there is no published denominator to divide them by. A return rate, in the sense of returns as a share of people liable to be returned, is not a figure that exists.
Every figure on this page is flagged provisional by the Home Office, which means it can be revised in later releases. See provisional, revised and official statistics in development, and return for the definitions in full.
How to cite this: Returns
- Home Office, Immigration system statistics year ending June 2026, How many people are returned from the UK?, table Ret_01. Cited for Returns from the UK (enforced plus voluntary). Enforced returns from the UK. Voluntary returns from the UK. Asylum-related returns. Published . https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-june-2026/how-many-people-are-returned-from-the-uk. Checked by us on .
- Home Office, Immigration system statistics year ending June 2026, How many people are returned from the UK? (table Ret_01). Cited for Refused entry at port and subsequently departed. Published . https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a85c576b0504df9f2c89805/returns-summary-jun-2026-tables.ods (spreadsheet download). Checked by us on .
Via UK Migration Explorer, https://ukmigrationexplorer.org/returns/.
Every figure on this page
Show each figure's confidence grade and the date it was checked
Each figure on this page carries the period it covers, the date this site last checked it against its source, and this site's own confidence grade. The grade is our judgement about how far the figure can be relied on, not the publisher's.
- Returns from the UK (enforced plus voluntary)
- provisional year ending June 2026 Checked by us on
- Enforced returns from the UK
- provisional year ending June 2026 Checked by us on
- Voluntary returns from the UK
- provisional year ending June 2026 Checked by us on
- Refused entry at port and subsequently departed
- provisional year ending June 2026 Checked by us on
- Asylum-related returns
- provisional year ending June 2026 Checked by us on
This page was last reviewed on . Its figures are not a live count; they were all checked against their sources on .