Iran: what the official figures show
Detected arrivals by illegal entry routes, and the asylum outcomes published for Iran. Every figure is as its publisher recorded it.
4,505 people recorded as Iran were detected arriving by illegal entry routes in 2025, and 6,705 asylum claims were made, with 55% of decisions granting protection.
It is a page about figures published for a nationality, not about the people who hold it. Nationality here is as recorded by the publisher, sometimes at the point of encounter and sometimes self-reported.
There is no prison figure on this page, deliberately. This site holds the foreign-national prison population by nationality and publishes it on the index page with the caveat it needs — that prison nationality is not immigration status and includes people living here entirely lawfully. A country-headed page carrying a prison count is the one thing on this site most likely to be screenshotted without that caveat, so the figure is not here at all.
Nothing here is divided by any population. No official count of UK residents of a given nationality exists, so no rate can be constructed and none is — the rule in full.
Detected arrivals, year by year
The highest year in this series is 2021 with 8,319, against 4,505 in 2025. The series covers 2018 to 2025 only. A zero is a zero in the published table — it means none were detected and recorded under this nationality that year, not that none arrived.
Claims from people who entered on a visa
The Home Office separately publishes how many people held a visa or other leave before claiming asylum, for the nationalities where the numbers are large enough to report. For Iran that is 1,710 people: 365 last held a study visa, 1,074 a work visa and 184 a visitor visa.
This count and the claims figure below come from two different tables in the same release, so they are given as two counts and no share of one in the other is calculated here. Holding a visa before claiming is not itself evidence about the claim.
Asylum outcomes
Claims, decisions and the grant rate as published. Decisions in a period are not decisions on the claims made in that period — a claim can take years, so the two columns describe different groups of people.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Asylum claims | 6,705 |
| Initial decisions | 8,072 |
| Of those decisions, granted protection | 55% |
| Awaiting an initial decision | 2,763 |
| Small-boat claims decided | 4,596 |
| Of those, granted protection | 42% |
The small-boat rows come from a separate published table covering claims by people who arrived on small boats, over its own period — Year ending June 2026. They are a subset of the claims above, not an addition to them.
Data as of
Cite this page
Iran: arrivals, asylum claims and outcomes. Migration Watchdog, data as of 2026-09-03. https://migrationwatchdog.com/nationalities/iran Underlying figures: UK official statistics, re-published under OGL v3.0 — every figure links to its source on the page.
Sources for this page
- Illegal entry routes to the UK summary tables, year ending June 2026 (Home Office) — Home Office · calendar year 2025 · retrieved 2026-09-02
- Asylum summary tables, year ending June 2026 (Home Office, Immigration system statistics) — Home Office · Year ending June 2026 · retrieved 2026-09-03
- Asylum summary tables, year ending June 2026 (Home Office, Immigration system statistics) — Home Office · Year ending June 2026 · retrieved 2026-09-03