The Home Office granted protection in 38% of initial decisions in the year to June 2026, down from 48% a year earlier and 77% at the 2022 peak. The biggest single shift is Syria. The rate is for first decisions only, and appeals have historically lifted final outcomes well above it.
In the year to June 2026, 38% of main applicants who received an initial decision were granted refugee status or another form of leave.1 The figure was 48% a year earlier, 58% in the year to June 2024 and 71% in the year to June 2023.345 The Home Office puts the peak at 77%, in the year to September 2022.1
Decisions did not slow. 115,872 people received an initial decision, 2% more than the year before. 42,394 were granted protection or leave (down 21%) and 73,478 were refused (up 23%).1 Those counts include dependants, so they give a slightly lower share granted, 36.6%, than the 38% main-applicant rate the Home Office headlines.
The overall rate is an average across very different caseloads, so a change in who is claiming moves it as much as any change in how claims are judged. The Home Office lists the nationality mix of claimants, conditions in their home countries at the time of decision, and operational choices about which cases to decide first as factors behind the rate.1 It does not say how much each one contributed.
The clearest single change is Syria. Its grant rate fell from 98% to 10% in a year.1 Syrian claims fell by 73%, and the Home Office links that drop to the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024.2 Pakistan’s grant rate roughly halved, from 46% to 25%. Claims from Sudan and Eritrea were still mostly granted, at 92% and 84%.1 A year earlier the same pattern hit Afghanistan, whose grant rate fell from 96% to 40% in the year to June 2025.3
At the end of June 2026, 40,168 people (32,401 cases) were awaiting an initial decision, 56% fewer than a year earlier and the lowest since June 2019. There were 93,293 people receiving asylum support, 12% fewer than a year before. 16,021 of them were in hotels, half the June 2025 number.6 Claims also fell. 85,891 people claimed asylum in the year to June 2026, 21% fewer than the year before; 40% of them arrived by small boat.2
The published text does not split the fall into nationality mix, country conditions and changes in decision-making, so we cannot say how much of it reflects policy. The initial rate is also not the final outcome. For claims made between 2007 and 2022, the Home Office reports that the latest grant rate averaged 20 percentage points above the initial rate.1 Between 2004 and 2021, about a third of determined appeals were allowed.7 Appeals currently take more than a year on average, so the final outcome for this year’s refusals will not be known for some time.1