Nigeria: what the official figures show
The asylum and enforcement figures the Home Office publishes for Nigeria. There is no illegal-entry-routes series for this nationality, and this page says so rather than leaving a gap. Every figure is as its publisher recorded it.
3,179 asylum claims were made by people recorded as Nigeria, with 28% of decisions granting protection. The Home Office publishes no illegal-entry-routes series for this nationality.
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.
No arrivals series is published for Nigeria
The other pages in this section open with detected arrivals by illegal entry route, year by year. That series is not published for Nigeria: the Home Office breaks detected arrivals down by nationality only for the largest groups, and this nationality is not among them. This is an absence in what is collected and published, and it is stated here rather than left as a section that appears to be missing.
It does not mean nobody of this nationality arrived by an illegal route, and no figure should be inferred from the silence in either direction. What follows is what the department does publish for Nigeria.
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 Nigeria that is 2,783 people: 792 last held a study visa, 1,426 a work visa and 448 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 | 3,179 |
| Initial decisions | 3,815 |
| Of those decisions, granted protection | 28% |
| Awaiting an initial decision | 1,429 |
Data as of
Cite this page
Nigeria: arrivals, asylum claims and outcomes. Migration Watchdog, data as of 2026-09-03. https://migrationwatchdog.com/nationalities/nigeria 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