MigrationWatchdog

Asylum accommodation in Canterbury

England · South East — asylum support snapshot, as at 30 Jun 2026.

205 asylum seekers were in receipt of Home Office asylum support in Canterbury as at 30 Jun 2026.

205
asylum seekers supported
as at 30 Jun 2026 · source
204
in dispersal accommodation
as at 30 Jun 2026 · source
1
other or unclassified support
as at 30 Jun 2026 · source

Canterbury ranks #132 of 346 UK local authorities with supported asylum seekers, carrying 0.3% of England's supported caseload — 12.6 per 10,000 residents (against the mid-2025 population estimate of 162,612). No contingency accommodation (hotel or otherwise) is recorded here at this snapshot. South East overview → · Compare all authorities →

The last 12 quarters

227030 Sep 202330 Jun 202630 Sep 2023 — 7331 Dec 2023 — 7231 Mar 2024 — 8530 Jun 2024 — 9430 Sep 2024 — 10831 Dec 2024 — 10331 Mar 2025 — 15630 Jun 2025 — 18430 Sep 2025 — 19931 Dec 2025 — 22731 Mar 2026 — 22230 Jun 2026 — 205
People in receipt of Home Office asylum support in Canterbury, quarterly snapshots. Asylum seekers in receipt of Home Office support by local authority, year ending June 2026 (Home Office, Immigration system statistics).

Up 181% since 30 Sep 2023.

Where this sits in the record

Everything here comes from the same published accommodation table as the figures above, across the 12 quarters it covers — so it is available for every authority in all four nations, and no figure is combined with one from a different collection.

Highest and lowest recorded

The highest quarter recorded here is 227 (31 Dec 2025) and the lowest 72 (31 Dec 2023). The latest is 205. The series starts at 30 Sep 2023, so an earlier or later extreme would not appear in it.

Rank, then and now

Canterbury ranked #215 of 315 authorities with a recorded caseload in 30 Sep 2023, and #132 of 346 now. It has moved up 83 places.

Its own caseload changed by +132 over the same period, against -28,383 across England.

Accommodation mix, against England

Accommodation type in Canterbury as a share of its supported population, against England
Accommodation typePeople hereShare hereShare in England
Dispersal accommodation20499.5%72.2%
Contingency accommodation—0%20.1%
— of which hotels—0%18.5%
Initial accommodation—0%1.6%
Other or unclassified10.5%6.1%

Hotels are a subset of contingency accommodation, so the shares do not sum to 100%. Both columns come from the same snapshot of the same table.

Census context (2021)

157,429
usual residents
Census day, 21 March 2021 · source
12.9%
born outside the UK (20,300)
Census day, 21 March 2021 · source
0.7%
cannot speak English well or at all (1,048)
Census day, 21 March 2021 · source

The legal route, locally

Alongside asylum dispersal, Canterbury has received 82 people through formal resettlement schemes since 2014 — 9 of them in the last four published quarters.

four quarters to 2026 Q2, and cumulative since 2014 · source

Language in schools

The Department for Education publishes pupils by first language at county level, not for district authorities such as Canterbury, so no figure is shown here rather than borrowing the county's.

A pupil's first language is not immigration status, and this is not a count of migrant children — most pupils with another first language are British citizens. State-funded schools only.

academic year 2025/26 · source

When asylum accommodation ends

1 household was owed a homelessness relief duty in Canterbury after being required to leave Home Office asylum accommodation (January to March 2026) — of 134 households owed that duty for any reason.

Households, not people. Prevention (threatened with homelessness) and relief (already homeless) are different duties and are never added together here — a household can move from one to the other.

January to March 2026 · source

Ranked nearby

Support counts are a point-in-time snapshot by registered address; contingency sites open and close between quarters. Census figures are from March 2021 and predate arrivals since. Numbers say where the asylum system places people — they say nothing about any individual.

Data as of

Cite this page

Asylum accommodation in Canterbury. Migration Watchdog, data as of 2026-09-02.
https://migrationwatchdog.com/local/canterbury
Underlying figures: UK official statistics, re-published under OGL v3.0 — every figure links to its source on the page.

Sources for this page