The costs the headline figure leaves out.
The real cost of immigration is bigger than the headline, council bills nobody counts, visa routes that lose money for life, an ageing crisis migration only delays. Bigger than they admit. Smaller than the scare stories. Here's what the state's own numbers show.
32 figures, each with its official source.
The NAO states this 'does not fully capture all costs associated with the asylum system, particularly those incurred by local authorities.' A floor for asylum, not a total for immigration. Counted, not modelled.
Education, ESOL, integration and social care fall on councils and are 'not covered sufficiently by existing funding', but no official £-figure exists, so none is invented here. A known-but-unquantified gap.
In a Local Government Association snapshot of 92 councils, 72% said the grant covers their asylum costs 'to a small extent or not at all', a survey claim, not an audited figure.
Nationality isn't recorded in the tax system and service use isn't attributed by immigration status. Anyone quoting a single 'total cost' is estimating, not citing a count, and the absence hides contributions as much as costs.
84.5% of claimants are UK/Ireland/right-of-abode; the ~16% non-UK share roughly matches the foreign-born share of the population and is overwhelmingly SETTLED (EUSS/ILR/refugee). Asylum seekers cannot claim UC at all. (The circulating '£10bn' is UC to households with ≥1 non-UK national, a campaign-group household estimate, not a DWP statistic, including mixed households with a British claimant.)
Modelled lifetime net present value = −£5.6bn across the cohort. The Partner route has no salary or work requirement; ~49% arrival-year employment, ~£20k median pay.
Modelled = −£4.9bn across 34,400 in-country grantees in 2025. Same MAC model on a different route/cohort, cite separately from the −£109k Partner figure; do not add them.
MAC: 'Care Workers are fiscally negative over their lifetimes,' driven by sub-threshold salaries. Excludes the social value of the care itself; nurses/doctors on the same route are +£166k.
Low first-year employment (44%). The −£3.3bn from Health & Care dependants wipes out much of the +£5.5bn from Health & Care main applicants.
Kept here for honesty: skilled workers are strongly net-positive. But 72% of the whole cohort's gain comes from the top 30% of earners, this figure must NEVER stand in for 'the average migrant.' It depends entirely who comes.
OUR ESTIMATE, transparent arithmetic, not an official total. We sum the MAC's OWN 2022/23-cohort figures for two net-negative routes: Family/Partner −£5.6bn + Health & Care dependants −£3.3bn ≈ −£8.9bn in lifetime net cost, from just two routes in a single year. Deliberately CONSERVATIVE: it EXCLUDES care workers (also negative) and the Home Office's separate Article 8 estimate (−£4.9bn), which we do not add to avoid double-counting. A projection of lifetime net present value, not cash already spent, the real figure across all low-value routes is larger.
A PROJECTION on unchanged policy, which the OBR calls 'unsustainable.' Driven by AGEING, pensions, health, the dependency ratio, not by immigration. State pension spending rises from ~5% to 7.7% of GDP.
ONS: deaths are projected to exceed births from mid-2026; without migration the population would shrink. Projected 69.3m → 71.0m by 2034, peak 72.5m by mid-2054, on a 230,000/yr assumption. A projection, not a forecast.
Higher net migration lowers debt ~30 points by 2072-73 but does not prevent the rise, because migrants age too. The OBR: migration 'delays… rather than resolves' the ageing challenge permanently.
OBR, verbatim: lower net migration 'would be likely to create additional fiscal pressures, but [government] could always choose to offset those pressures through additional spending cuts or tax increases.' Rebuts 'we have no choice.'
Projection. 3.4 is the early-1970s value, not today's. Fewer workers per pensioner is the engine of the long-run squeeze, the problem migration is asked to paper over.
The YE Dec 2022 net-migration estimate was revised UP three times, by +267,000; the peak was later revised up to 944,000. But revisions run BOTH ways, recent years were cut, and net migration has since fallen to 171,000. Late and volatile, not a hidden bigger number.
Detected arrivals only, the true total is higher The Home Office states its figures 'only cover known detected arrivals,' exclude those who evade detection, and 'cannot be summed to infer the total.' The real irregular total is higher, by an UNKNOWN amount it refuses to estimate. No specific undetected number is invented here.
Response-rate collapse, not political interference, but it directly undermines confidence in the migrant-population-by-nationality figures the whole debate relies on. ONS migration stats are formally 'in development.'
Measured (HMRC PAYE). Rises over time but stays ~25+ points below the ~75% national rate, with median pay only ~£13,000 after 8 years. 'Rises but stays low', not 'refugees never work.'
Vs 25% for women overall, the largest gender gap of any ethnic group. But this data includes UK-born citizens (an integration gap in settled communities, not immigration inflow), and Indian employment (77%) matches White British (76%). Community- and gender-specific, not an 'Asian' or 'migrant' effect.
'Migrants don't work' is false as a blanket claim: migrant men out-work UK-born men, and migrant women (72%) are within a point of UK-born women (73%). The gaps are specific to refugees and women in some communities, name the group, don't smear the whole.
Far below the 2.08 replacement rate; the ageing crisis is driven by LOW native fertility, not migrant birth rates. Non-UK-born fertility (2.03 in 2021) is only just above replacement and converging. The 'replacement' narrative is not supported by the data.
Modelled. England's household count is projected to rise 23.5m→25.9m (2022–2032), averaging 242,000 more households/year. With deaths now exceeding births, this growth is overwhelmingly migration-driven, though ONS publishes no single 'migration share' figure.
A stated aim of successive governments since 2017, never once sustained in delivery. The current 1.5m-homes-this-Parliament pledge (~370k/yr) is a separate, higher target.
Measured. Down 6% on 2023-24's 221,410, the lowest of the recent five-year run, and heading the wrong way just as demand climbs.
OUR ESTIMATE (transparent arithmetic, not an official statistic): 300,000 target − 208,600 built ≈ 91,400/year; against ONS's 242,000 projected new households the gap is ~33,000/year. Projections (10-yr average) and delivery (one year) are different bases, an order-of-magnitude illustration.
Near the September 2025 record (134,760), including 176,130 dependent children, though the latest quarter saw the first small fall since 2022. Driven by the supply/affordability squeeze; one input among ageing and under-supply, not attributable to migration alone. Full picture: #/housing.
Measured. HONESTY: asylum seekers cannot join these lists and migrants are UNDER-represented in social housing (15% of residents, below their population share). The list reflects a chronic shortage, not queue-jumping, stating this pre-empts the easiest dismissal.
Down from ~9% at the 2024 peak, but rises compound onto record levels, average £1,442/month. Migration concentrates in the private rented sector, adding demand, but rents are also driven by landlord exit, interest rates and supply. Full picture: #/housing.
The only official quantification: the MAC (2018) found a 1-percentage-point rise in population from migration lifts house prices ~1%, real but modest per unit. The crisis comes from sustained high volumes over years plus rates, planning and land supply. Kept here for honesty.