MigrationWatchdog

Asylum accommodation in Preston

England · North West — asylum support snapshot, as at 30 Jun 2026.

407 asylum seekers were in receipt of Home Office asylum support in Preston as at 30 Jun 2026.

407
asylum seekers supported
as at 30 Jun 2026 · source
396
in dispersal accommodation
as at 30 Jun 2026 · source
11
other or unclassified support
as at 30 Jun 2026 · source

Preston ranks #76 of 346 UK local authorities with supported asylum seekers, carrying 0.5% of England's supported caseload — 24.7 per 10,000 residents (against the mid-2025 population estimate of 164,498). No contingency accommodation (hotel or otherwise) is recorded here at this snapshot. North West overview → · Compare all authorities →

The last 12 quarters

431030 Sep 202330 Jun 202630 Sep 2023 — 37431 Dec 2023 — 40231 Mar 2024 — 40730 Jun 2024 — 43130 Sep 2024 — 42531 Dec 2024 — 42431 Mar 2025 — 39430 Jun 2025 — 42930 Sep 2025 — 40931 Dec 2025 — 42931 Mar 2026 — 42930 Jun 2026 — 407
People in receipt of Home Office asylum support in Preston, quarterly snapshots. Asylum seekers in receipt of Home Office support by local authority, year ending June 2026 (Home Office, Immigration system statistics).

Broadly flat since 30 Sep 2023 (+9%).

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 431 (30 Jun 2024) and the lowest 374 (30 Sep 2023). The latest is 407. The series starts at 30 Sep 2023, so an earlier or later extreme would not appear in it.

Rank, then and now

Preston ranked #103 of 315 authorities with a recorded caseload in 30 Sep 2023, and #76 of 346 now. It has moved up 27 places.

Its own caseload changed by +33 over the same period, against -28,383 across England.

Accommodation mix, against England

Accommodation type in Preston as a share of its supported population, against England
Accommodation typePeople hereShare hereShare in England
Dispersal accommodation39697.3%72.2%
Contingency accommodation—0%20.1%
— of which hotels—0%18.5%
Initial accommodation—0%1.6%
Other or unclassified112.7%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)

147,835
usual residents
Census day, 21 March 2021 · source
19.3%
born outside the UK (28,494)
Census day, 21 March 2021 · source
2.7%
cannot speak English well or at all (3,857)
Census day, 21 March 2021 · source

The legal route, locally

Alongside asylum dispersal, Preston has received 59 people through formal resettlement schemes since 2014 — 8 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 Preston, 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

20 households were owed a homelessness relief duty in Preston after being required to leave Home Office asylum accommodation (January to March 2026) — of 122 households owed that duty for any reason. A further 7 were owed a prevention duty for the same 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 Preston. Migration Watchdog, data as of 2026-09-02.
https://migrationwatchdog.com/local/preston
Underlying figures: UK official statistics, re-published under OGL v3.0 — every figure links to its source on the page.

Sources for this page