What the asylum system costs

The accommodation contracts: 3.4× the original estimate

“It originally estimated that the total contract cost would be £4.5 billion over 10 years. However, the current estimated total is £15.3 billion over the same period.”

The Asylum Accommodation and Support Contracts (AASC) run 2019–2029 across 7 regional contracts. The red figure marks the series' record escalation — the one thing on this site red is reserved for.

The hotel population the money pays for

Detention: the state's own price tag

The one running cost the Home Office publishes as a machine-readable series: the average cost per day to hold one person in immigration detention — currently £148.72 (2026 Q2).

The department's own accounting

The Home Office's transparency data carries its own asylum cost ledger: total asylum costs of £4.36bn in financial year 2025/26 — against £568m in 2010/11 — and its own unit cost of £25,122 per asylum conclusion (financial year 2023/24). These are the department's figures, not ours.

Total asylum costs, the Home Office's own unit cost per conclusion, and asylum caseworking staff, by financial year (table ASY_04). Nominal £; unit cost unavailable for some years as published.

Provider payments in the £25k+ disclosures

The Home Office publishes every individual transaction of £25,000 or more. We total those disclosures each month for the three asylum accommodation contract holders. Across January 2025 to June 2026, transactions naming Clearsprings Ready Homes sum to £464.2m, Mears Group £84.4m and Serco £233.4m — against the £4.0bn the NAO reports asylum support cost in FY 2024-25 alone. The pattern is the finding: in 11 of the 18 months the disclosures contain no transaction at all naming Clearsprings or Mears — while the accommodation contracts run continuously — so this series cannot be read as what the providers are actually paid, and the department's transaction-level transparency does not consistently show its largest contract payments.

Individual transactions of £25,000 or more only — NOT total departmental spending. Provider columns are the sum of disclosed transactions naming each asylum-accommodation contractor in that month; a £0 month means no disclosed transaction for that provider, not that the contractor went unpaid.

Who holds the contracts

The public bodies that examine this spending — the National Audit Office, the Public Accounts Committee and the rest — and whether the government answered them, are on who checks the immigration system. The Asylum Accommodation and Support Contracts are held by 3 companies across 7regions. Their statutory filings — accounts, officers, ownership — are on the public register:

• Clearsprings Ready Homes Ltd
  Company 07921508 · active · Companies House ↗
• Serco Limited
  Company 00242246 · active · Companies House ↗
• Mears Group PLC
  Company 03232863 · active · Companies House ↗

What their accounts show — and what they do not

All three providers file full statutory accounts, which disclose turnover. That would be the closest thing to an audited figure for what the accommodation business is worth to the companies running it. It is not published here, because it is not machine-readable: Companies House serves these particular filings as scanned PDFs with no extractable text and no iXBRL data — the most recent Clearsprings accounts run to 32 pages and contain zero characters of text. Producing a revenue figure from them would mean reading a financial table off an image with nothing to check it against, which is exactly the kind of number this site refuses to publish. What can be stated exactly is the filing record itself:

Even with a turnover figure, company revenue would not be the same thing as what the Home Office paid: these companies have other customers and other contracts, and a group figure is not a contract figure. The audited figures for what asylum accommodation costs the department are the National Audit Office ones above.

Legal aid for asylum cases

The other public cost of the asylum system is the advice that runs it. In 2025-26, 61,070 asylum Legal Help matters were completed at a cost of £48.5m, alongside 5,169 non-asylum immigration matters (£5.3m). A further 2,221 Exceptional Case Funding applications were made on immigration — a count only, as the published data carries no spend against those rows.

Legal Help is initial advice and assistance, not representation at a hearing — appeals are separately funded through Civil Representation. Civil Representation closures for 2025-26 (423) sit far below 2024-25 (1,616) because claims are submitted long after the work concludes, so no year-on-year comparison is drawn for that scheme. The publisher suppresses immigration volumes under three in a quarter.

The number nobody publishes

No UK government body publishes an official estimate of the net fiscal impact of illegal or irregular migration. What exists officially is piecemeal, and it is all on this page: the NAO's spend analyses, the Home Office's audited accounts and losses notes, one machine-readable running-cost series (detention), and transaction-level disclosures that omit the largest contracts. Net-impact figures you may see elsewhere are constructed by campaign groups or think tanks on their own assumptions — this site quotes official numbers only, so it does not carry one.

What the money houses today

The spending above supports 93,293 asylum seekers in receipt of Home Office support (as at 30 June 2026), of whom 16,021 are in contingency hotels — down from a peak of 56,018 (as at 30 Sep 2023) on the Home Office's own series, yet hotels still absorb a share of contract cost far out of proportion to the people they house.

Download this data

• Asylum costs and unit cost: CSV · JSON
• £25k+ disclosures: CSV · JSON
• Detention cost per day: CSV · JSON
• Curated cost citations: CSV · JSON

Every file carries provenance headers. All datasets →