How much of its asylum spending does the Home Office actually publish?
The Home Office spent £4.90bn on asylum in 2024/25, about £71 for every person in the UK. It published a detailed record of £539.7m of it. That is about £11 in every £100.
Home Office payment data covers April 2010 to July 2026. Spending totals are for 2024/25.
Last checked .
The Home Office does account for all of it, to Parliament and to its auditors, in totals. What it does not do is publish a line-by-line record of most of it. This page is about what you are allowed to see, not about money going astray.
Where the money goes
The National Audit Office published a breakdown of what was actually spent in 2024/25. Set against it, this is how much of each part has a published record.
| What it pays for | Spent | Published |
|---|---|---|
| Housing and living costsAccommodation and support (excluding unaccompanied children) | £3.40bn | not separable |
| Somewhere to live | £2.70bn | £356.3m |
| Money to live on | £220.0m | £75.6m |
| Payments to councils for housing | £247.0m | not separable |
| Payments to councils for lone childrenGrants and incentive payments to councils for unaccompanied children | £636.0m | not separable |
| Deciding the claimsAsylum caseworking | £367.0m | not separable |
| Processing people on arrivalIrregular Migration Intake Unit | £75.0m | not separable |
| Challenging a refusalAsylum appeals | £102.0m | not separable |
| Detention and leaving the UKAsylum detention and removals | £46.0m | not separable |
| Running the departmentHome Office overheads | £160.0m | not separable |
| Changing how housing is providedAccommodation Transformation Programme | £36.6m | not separable |
| Running the tribunalImmigration and Asylum Chamber overheads | £51.2m | not separable |
| Legal helpLegal aid for asylum and immigration appeals | £22.8m | not separable |
| Answering questionsCustomer helpline | £8.4m | not separable |
| Everything, added up | £4.90bn | £539.7m |
"Not separable" means that part cannot be picked out of the published file, not that it is zero. Spending figures: National Audit Office, An analysis of the asylum system. The NAO's own stated total. Do not recompute it by summing the rows above: some are subcomponents and some costs sit outside the published breakdown.
The councils
The Home Office paid councils about £883.0m in 2024/25: money for housing people, and for looking after children who arrive alone. Searching every supplier name in the published file for that year finds £1,595,281.
Refugee Council is a charity, not a local authority. A search that counted it would return £3,593,345, more than double the right answer.
How we know, and how to check it
Every figure in the "published" column comes from the Home Office's ownspending over £25,000 files: 276 of 276 published files, covering 2010 to 2026, holding 17,103 asylum transactions worth £4.33bn across 369 suppliers.
The Home Office tags asylum in two separate fields, and both are used here: the directorate that spent the money, and the code for what it bought. Using only one misses about a third of it.
Not total asylum spending. Only transactions over £25,000 recorded by the Home Office against an asylum classification. The NAO puts actual 2024-25 Home Office and MoJ asylum spend at around £4.9 billion. The difference is reported in aggregate elsewhere, not missing.
Biggest suppliers, all years
- Prepaid Financial Services£669.2m
- Calder Conferences£540.5m
- Clearsprings Ready Homes£519.3m
- CWT (formerly Carlson Wagonlit Travel)£365.9m
- Serco£352.3m
- Sodexo Motivation Solutions UK Ltd£242.6m
- G4S Care & Justice Services (UK)£215.5m
- Mitie FM£135.5m
- Sodexo Pass£134.0m
- Corporate Travel Management (North)£101.7m
Source data is Crown copyright, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Spending totals cited from National Audit Office, An analysis of the asylum system.