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.