Immigration Contribution Overview
What Skilled Worker and Health & Care visa holders bring in and what the new 10-year settlement path costs a family, using Home Office, NAO, ONS and fee-table figures.
Figures in people or £ as labelled. Calculations from published inputs are marked as such.
Visas granted, 2021 to 2025
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Skilled Worker only —
Dependant visas since 2021
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Skilled Worker dependants, year to June 2026 —
Health surcharge income, 2025-26
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2024-25 —
Extra cost of the 10-year route
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Family of — (pick the size below). 5-year route —, 10-year route —
Dependant visas and government income, by year
Follows the year picked at the top. n/a means the sources I could reach give no published figure for that year, and nothing is estimated. Purple figures are my arithmetic on published numbers. 2026 is the year to June 2026 for visas and dependants, and the 2025-26 financial year for the health surcharge.
Money columns are financial years ending in March of the year shown (2025 means 2024-25). The health surcharge is paid by all migrants who must pay it, not only Skilled Worker and Health & Care holders, and the Home Office total includes amounts payable to the Consolidated Fund before the NHS share. "Granted" counts visas issued; "entering" counts arrivals (NAO) and is a different measure.
References: NAO, Immigration: Skilled Worker visas (March 2025), paras 1.10, 1.11, 1.13, 2.13; Home Office immigration system statistics, year ending December 2024 (work) and year ending June 2026 (work); Lords written answer HL7737, 30 May 2025 (surcharge 2022-23 and 2023-24); surcharge 2024-25 (£2.42bn) and 2025-26 (£2.32bn) are the Home Office figures already used in the key figures above; I did not re-check them against the 2024-25 annual report in this update.
Visa cost by family size
Pick a family size. This table, the cost split, the route comparison and the extra-cost figure above all update. Two adults, the rest children.
| Cost | 5-year route | 10-year route | Extra on 10-year | How the 5-year cost is worked out |
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Calculated, not a government total. Unit rates per person come from the family-of-four figures (Home Office fee tables and the health surcharge). Dependants are assumed to pay the same visa fees as the main applicant. The 10-year route is assumed to repeat the 5-year visa fees and surcharge and to pay the settlement fee once. A family of four matches the figures used earlier on this page. The visa fee used is the Skilled Worker in-UK rate; Health & Care Worker visas cost £324 (up to 3 years) or £628 (over 3 years) per person, and I have not verified whether the health surcharge applies to them.
Visa grants by year
Entry clearance, main applicants, outside the UK. 2026* is the year to June 2026 (Home Office, provisional)
Skilled WorkerHealth & Care
Projected settlement grants
Under the old five-year rules; projections, not applications
Skilled WorkerHealth & Care
What the selected family pays on the 5-year route
Application fees, health surcharge and settlement fees. Follows the family size picked above
Health surchargeApplication feesSettlement fees
5-year route against 10-year route
Total visa cost for the selected family, in £
Tax and National Insurance by salary
Illustrative calculation at 2026/27 rates; the government does not publish a total
Income taxEmployee NIEmployer NI
Household spending per week
UK average household, financial year ending 2025 (April 2024 to March 2025), the latest year ONS has published. Later years will be added when ONS publishes them.
Week, housing, transport and food are published ONS figures. Month (weekly × 52 ÷ 12) and year (weekly × 52) are arithmetic on the published weekly figure. Food and non-alcoholic drinks is the UK average for all households (ONS table A1), £73.70 a week.
Reference: ONS, Family spending in the UK: April 2024 to March 2025
Europe and the UK: eleven countries compared
Pick a category, a measure and the countries to compare. Each figure carries its own year, since official European statistics run a year or more behind. Where the sources I could reach give no figure for a country it shows n/a, never an estimate. Most figures were pulled directly from the Eurostat and UNHCR databases on 5 November 2026. A few (Blue Cards, seasonal permits, sea arrivals, Frontex and pending cases) still come from agency releases and reports that cite them.
Statuses: official means a published figure; calculated is my arithmetic on published inputs; approximate is a published range or rounded share.
First-time asylum applicants, EU, 2024
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Down 13% on 2023. Eurostat
First residence permits, EU, 2024
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Non-EU citizens, about 3.5 million. Eurostat
EU Blue Cards, 2024
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Germany issued 72% of them. A different measure from Eurostat's first-permit table (36,300)
Irregular border crossings, EU, 2025
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Preliminary, down 26% on 2024. Frontex
Sea arrivals in Europe, 2024
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UNHCR
Pending asylum cases, end 2024
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First instance, EU+. EUAA
Country comparison
All first residence permits issued to non-EU citizens in 2024, for any reason.
First permits issued for work reasons in 2024. Poland's figure is 337,874 (Eurostat). The UK figure is Skilled Worker plus Health & Care visas granted abroad to main applicants, my sum of Home Office figures, so it is not strictly comparable.
First permits issued for family reasons in 2024.
EU Blue Cards for highly qualified workers, 2024. This is not the same measure as Eurostat's first-permit count (EU total 36,300 in 2024) and I could not reconcile the two.
Seasonal worker authorisations in 2024, counted in the single permit data. Not re-checked against the Eurostat database.
People applying for asylum for the first time in 2024. Exact Eurostat counts.
All applications for international protection in 2024. EUAA counts rounded to the nearest 1,000 for Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Greece and Ireland; exact Eurostat counts for the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium and Poland. The UK figure is people including dependants, back-calculated from the Home Office's 4% fall to 100,625 in 2025, so it is approximate.
How much asylum applications rose or fell from 2023 to 2024, in per cent, calculated from Eurostat total applicants.
People arriving by sea, 1 January to 24 August 2025, for Italy, Greece and Spain. The UK figure is small-boat arrivals for the whole of 2025, so it covers more months and is not directly comparable.
People born abroad per 1,000 residents on 1 January 2024, calculated from Eurostat population by country of birth.
Refugees and asylum seekers combined, end 2025 (UNHCR), including Ukrainians under temporary protection where UNHCR counts them.
Refugees and asylum seekers per 1,000 residents, 2025. Calculated against the Eurostat population on 1 January 2025.
Positive first-instance asylum decisions in 2025 (refugee, subsidiary protection and humanitarian status), Eurostat. Per-status counts are in the tooltip.
Net migration plus statistical adjustment per 1,000 residents in 2025, Eurostat crude rate. The count is in the tooltip.
Non-EU citizens found illegally present in 2025 per 1,000 residents, calculated from Eurostat. It counts people found by authorities, so it is an indicator and not a count of all irregular migrants.
Foreign-born people as a share of all employed people aged 20 to 64, fourth quarter of 2025, calculated from the Eurostat labour force survey.
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OfficialCalculatedApproximateHover a bar for source and notes
All figures side by side
Click a column heading to chart that measure. Click a row to add or remove a country. n/a means no figure in the sources reached.
| Country |
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Purple: calculatedYellow: approximateWhite: official
Immigrant contribution during NHS pressure, labour shortages and instability
ViewpointYou see migrants as having carried parts of the NHS and social care when they were short of staff. That is your reading; the figures behind it are below.
- Health & Care visas granted rose from 31,800 in 2021 to 145,823 in 2023, then fell to 13,193 in 2025 (Home Office, entry clearance).
- Health surcharge income was £2.42bn in 2024-25 and £2.32bn in 2025-26 (Home Office annual report), paid by migrants on top of tax.
- The government publishes no total of tax and National Insurance paid by Skilled Workers. The chart above is an illustration at 2026/27 rates.
The other side: ministers argue that net migration was too high and that reliance on overseas recruitment held back training and pay at home, which is why they closed the care worker route.
Dependants' economic impact
The National Audit Office counts 625,500 dependant visas issued since 2021 (its own count, March 2025; the Home Office entry-clearance tables sum to 652,783 Skilled Worker and Health & Care dependants for 2021 to 2025, so the two are on different bases). Skilled Worker dependants were 34,226 in the year to June 2026 and Health & Care dependants 26,915.
No official source measures what dependants pay or cost in total. Dependants pay the same visa fees and health surcharge as the main applicant (£18,110 across a family of four on the 5-year route, calculated), but their later earnings, benefit use and tax are not published. ViewpointYou see dependants as families who pay in first and are then charged again for the longer route.
Health surcharge income supporting public finances
The surcharge raised £2.42bn in 2024-25 and £2.32bn in 2025-26 for the NHS (Home Office annual report). For a family of four it is about £3,622 a year, or £18,110 over the 5-year route (calculated from GOV.UK fees). The Home Office does not publish how many people paid it.
European countries' reliance on migrants
- Poland issued 488,846 first residence permits in 2024, 337,874 of them for work.
- Germany issued 56,252 EU Blue Cards, 72% of the EU total, and about one in five residents was born abroad.
- Italy issued 146,099 seasonal worker authorisations, 53% of the EU total.
- Spain issued 562,000 first permits, 258,000 of them for family reasons.
Foreign-born share of employment (ages 20 to 64, Q4 2025, Eurostat) runs from 3.3% in Poland to 32.2% in Ireland. Migrant contribution to GDP was not found in the sources reached, so it is not shown.
My perspective: the policies feel inhumane, punitive and a betrayal of families
ViewpointYou feel the government's settlement policies are inhumane, punitive and a betrayal of thousands of families who came on the old five-year rules. This panel states your view; it is not a finding of the data.
What the figures show: for a family of four the 10-year route costs £25,570 more than the 5-year route (£64,044 against £38,474, calculated from GOV.UK fees).
The other side: the government says settlement should be earned, that the old rules let numbers grow faster than the country could support, and that lower-paid routes should take longer.
Scores and timeline category
The Contribution, Policy Severity and Human Impact scores (1 to 10) and the Before, During or After Crisis category are your judgments, so I have not filled them in. Send me your score for each country and category and I will add them as a selectable layer, marked as your viewpoint.
Not available from the sources reached
- Long-term residence permits by country.
- Border detections and land (Balkan) arrivals by country; Frontex gives route totals only.
- Pending asylum decisions by country; only the EU+ total of 981,000 is shown.
- A count of all irregular migrants: no government or Eurostat series exists. "Illegally present per 1,000" counts only people found by authorities.
- Migrant contribution to GDP, which was not found in the Eurostat, OECD or UNHCR sources reached. Foreign-born share of employment is shown.
- Full-year 2025 sea arrivals by country; the figures shown run to 24 August 2025 and UNHCR's full-year portal figures were not reached.
- UK: no figure here for first permits by reason, Blue Cards, seasonal workers, asylum change on 2023, positive decisions, net migration or workforce share. The Home Office does not use Eurostat's definitions, so UK figures are only loosely comparable.
- Most European figures are for 2024 or 2025, so the year chips above change only the UK charts.
Sources
- Home Office immigration system statistics
- National Audit Office; Home Office annual report; Command Papers CP 1448 and CP 1707; GOV.UK fee tables; ONS Family spending in the UK: April 2024 to March 2025
- Eurostat database, pulled 5 November 2026: migr_resfirst, migr_asyappctza, migr_asydcfsta, migr_pop3ctb, demo_pjan, demo_gind, migr_eipre, lfsq_egacob; UNHCR Population API (end 2025)
- Eurostat: first-time asylum applications 2024
- Eurostat single permits 2024, via Sofia Globe; first residence permits 2024, via The Local
- EUAA Latest Asylum Trends 2024; AIDA Briefing on Asylum in 2024 (Eurostat data)
- Frontex: irregular crossings, first 11 months of 2025
- UNHCR sea arrivals 2025, via EMN Belgium; UNHCR Mediterranean data portal
- Rockwool Foundation Berlin refugee report 2026 (UNHCR data); immigrant population report 2026
- UK: Home Office asylum claims and illegal entry routes, year ending December 2025; Migration Observatory: migrants in the UK
- Also named in the brief but not used because no figure could be reached: OECD migration indicators and IOM irregular migration data.
Not published by the government: the number of people who paid the health surcharge, the total tax and National Insurance paid by Skilled Workers, and an exact count of student to Skilled Worker switches (Home Office Migrant Journey tables).
Sources: Home Office immigration system statistics (entry clearance visas granted), National Audit Office, Home Office annual report, Command Paper CP 1448, GOV.UK fee tables, ONS Family Spending. Settlement and household cost figures marked as calculations are own arithmetic on those inputs.