Paying for the privilege of gaining asylum in the UK

Ali Ahmadi, Catherine Barnard and Fiona Costello consider the government’s proposal to ask refugees to repay around £10,000 towards asylum support that they received while their claim was being processed. The look at how it would work in practice, how much it would contribute to asylum costs, as well as its impact on asylum seekers. 

The government’s Immigration and Asylum Bill proposes that refugees will be asked to ‘repay some of our generosity’ by making a flat-rate ‘contribution’ of about £10,000 towards asylum support (i.e., accommodation and financial support) they received while their claim was being processed. The sum must be paid off in full before a refugee becomes eligible for settlement.

So how will it work? How much, if anything, will it contribute toward the cost of getting asylum and how will it affect asylum seekers and refugees?

The proposal is light on specifics. It will be at the Home Secretary’s discretion to set the charge and the income threshold at which repayment kicks in. There is no clarity about whether the flat rate will be applied not only to those who received financial support and accommodation but also to those who received financial support (£49.18 per week) but not accommodation during their claim.

According to the Home Office, the repayment will apply once a person is earning enough to pay instalments without being pushed into destitution. This raises the thorny issue of refugees and employment. Asylum seekers cannot work for the first year of being in the UK and only in limited circumstances after that. For those granted refugee status, Home Office data for 2015-2023 shows that only about one quarter were employed during the first year after receiving refugee status. From the second year onwards, the employment rate stabilised at roughly 50%. Of those in employment, 37% (i.e., less than one fifth of all refugees) were in full-time jobs eight years after being granted status, with a median annual income of around £23,000. These figures are likely to include refugees who did not receive asylum support because they were financially self-sufficient during the asylum process. In the year ending March 2026, more than 28% of people awaiting an initial asylum decision or appealing a refusal were not receiving asylum support, although it is unclear how many of them were working.

Among those who do find work, earnings stay low. The median income for employed refugees aged 16-64 reached only £13,000 after eight years of receiving their refugee status. By comparison, the UK’s median salary was £34,963 during the same period. This is also evident in the number of refugees on Universal Credit (UC). In December 2024, about 66% of those who received their refugee status in the last five years were on UC. Therefore, it is difficult to see how many refugees will meet the threshold for repayment, let alone make any meaningful contribution towards the costs of the asylum system (the Home Office spent £4.8bn on asylum support in 2025).

Further, those who did not get asylum will also be asked to repay the cost of any asylum support they had previously received before they can seek any other kind of visa to come to the UK (e.g., study, work, tourist). It is impossible to estimate how many would have the will or the financial means to make such repayments.

Refugees remain out of the labour market for a variety of reasons including limited social network, language barriers, and mental health challenges. Similarly, employment bans imposed on asylum seekers for at least the first year of their application cause de-skilling, with long term consequences for getting work. The longer asylum seekers are barred from working, the more difficult it becomes for them to secure employment after receiving their refugee status. A study from Germany found that asylum seekers who experienced longer waiting periods before receiving permission to work were less likely to find employment within five years, and it took nearly a decade for this employment gap to disappear. Conversely, lifting employment bans and faster asylum processing procedure are accompanied by improved employment outcome.

Poor-quality initial decision is also costly. Incorrect refusals push many genuine refugees into appeals, prolonging their reliance on asylum support. At the end of March 2026, more than twice as many people were receiving asylum support as were waiting on an initial decision (97,519 compared with 48,758), indicating that a large proportion of those in receipt of asylum support were awaiting the outcome of an appeal. About one-third of asylum appeals are successful at the First-tier Tribunal. By March 2026, a total of 87,450 cases (related to about 114,000 people) were waiting an average of 67 weeks for an appeal. Therefore, improving the quality of initial decisions would do more to reduce asylum costs.

The repayment scheme could be highly consequential for refugees. Because it is linked to eligibility for settlement, many refugees may be unable to secure settlement for decades, if at all. Evidence suggests that most refugees will not earn enough, at least within the first decade of living in the UK, to repay the sum. This will likely be exacerbated by the temporary refugee status announced in March this year, under which refugees’ leave to remain is reviewed every 2.5 years and it takes refugees up to 20 years to settle (previously, refugees were eligible for settlement after 5 years). Research shows that residency restrictions often impede refugees’ ability to start employment. This, in turn, would make it harder to make the repayment, contributing to a vicious cycle of unemployment and ineligibility for settlement.

The measure may also discourage some asylum seekers from claiming asylum support knowing that it creates a future debt that delays settlement, even when they genuinely need it. That could leave vulnerable people more exposed to homelessness, and/or illegal, exploitative working conditions. Some may also decide that their declared earnings accelerate repayment, and instead remain in insecure or illegal employment rather than entering the legal/formal labour market.

To conclude, the proposed repayment scheme is unlikely to make any meaningful contribution to public finances. However, the impact on refugees’ ability to settle, integrate and become economically self-sufficient could be significant. If the aim is to reduce the long-term cost of the asylum system, better alternatives, as we discussed before, would be to lift the ban on asylum seekers’ right to work and ensure high-quality initial decision-making. These would save money for the Home Office and enable refugees to support themselves, contribute through tax, and improve their economic integration.

By Ali Ahmadi, Research Associate, University of Cambridge and PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University, Catherine Barnard, Senior Fellow, UK in a Changing Europe & Professor of EU Law and Employment Law, University of Cambridge and Fiona Costello, Assistant Professor, University of Birmingham.