Asylum hotels cost £5.77 million a day in 2024/25. The hotel population has since halved.

£2.1 billion on asylum hotel accommodation in 2024/25, which works out at £5.77 million a day. That sits inside £4 billion spent on asylum support altogether.

This is a 2024/25 figure, and it is the newest hotel-specific one anybody publishes. It is on this page dated rather than presented as today’s rate, because the thing it paid for has changed underneath it.

The hotel population has roughly halved since. The Home Office’s own quarterly series:

As at	In hotel accommodation	Share of all supported
30 September 2023	56,018	the peak
31 December 2024	38,054	33.9%
31 December 2025	30,657	28.7%
31 March 2026	20,885	21.4%
30 June 2026	16,021	17.2%

What the newer accounts do say. The Home Office Annual Report and Accounts 2025-26 puts asylum support, resettlement and accommodation at £4,181 million for the year to March 2026, down from £4,513 million. Across 365 days that is £11.5 million a day, but it is a different base: it covers all accommodation and support, not hotels, so it cannot be compared with the £5.77 million above. Two numbers that count different things are not a trend.

On the NAO. The National Audit Office has not published a per-day figure. Its reporting covers the accommodation contracts, where hotels were around 76% of the cost in the first seven months of 2024-25, £1.3 billion of an estimated £1.7 billion. That is a seven-month split and reads about 40% high if it is treated as a full year.

The ten-year asylum accommodation contract is forecast at £15.3 billion. 40,168 people were waiting for an initial decision at 30 June 2026, down from 64,426 at the end of 2025.