The Home Office publishes about £11 in every £100 it spends on asylum

£4.9 billion spent. £539.7 million itemised. The National Audit Office published a full breakdown of actual 2024-25 asylum costs in December 2025. Set against it, the Home Office’s own transparency publication accounts for about £11 in every £100.

This is not missing money. All of it is accounted for to Parliament and to auditors, in totals. What is not published is a line-by-line record of most of it. The finding is about what the public is allowed to see, not about money going astray.

Where the visible money sits. Of the £539.7m that does appear in 2024/25, half is coded INITIAL ACCOMMODATION and 14% CASH SUPPORT. So accommodation is not absent from the published file — but only a fraction of each payment stream surfaces, and we have not established why.

Financial year	In the £25k+ file	Actually spent
2023/24	£430.4m	£4.70bn
2024/25	£539.7m	£4.90bn
2025/26	£467.7m	£4.18bn

A caution on the underlying data. The Home Office tags asylum in two separate fields, and has used at least eleven different labels since 2010 — with none at all between 2017 and 2020. A rise or fall between two years in this series can be a reclassification rather than a change in spending.

Spending figures cited from An analysis of the asylum system, National Audit Office, December 2025. Payment data: Home Office spending over £25,000, Open Government Licence v3.0.