More Brits ditch UK than thought as net migration halved
More British nationals have ditched the UK than previously thought as the Office for National Statistics said net migration halved between 2024 and 2025.
The ONS said that 246,000 British nationals left the UK in 2025, with two thirds of people being aged 16 to 34.
This was a decline from 2024 when 257,000 British nationals left the country. It had previously been estimated that 77,000 Brits left the UK but a new method for calculating departures has given a “clearer idea of the true number”, according to data officials.
The statistics body said it had previously underestimated the numbers of Brits leaving but insisted that levels of emigration had been “stable”.
It added that it did not produce age breakdowns before 2019 and that new estimates could not be compared with older estimates, uncovering the difficulties of migration data.
The ONS said the numbers of young British residents leaving for Australia had jumped since 2021 while Poland was another popular destination.
In the broader set of data, the ONS said net migration in 2025 halved to 171,000. Net migration in 2024 was updated to 331,000 from a previous estimate of 345,000.
It suggested that Brits’ emigration did not drive the drop in net migration but shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the figures still showed that Britons were leaving on a “massive scale”.
He added: “Labour must go further and reform indefinite leave to remain before their hard-left flank forces them to abandon it altogether.”
The fall was driven by a drop-off in the number of non-EU nationals arriving for work-related reasons, reflecting falls in health and workers visa applications recorded by the Home Office.
Migration policies come into effect
Immigration to the UK in the year to last December was 813,000 while emigration was 642,000.
Economists have said that periods of high net migration are followed by times of lower migration levels.
Net migration reached a peak of 944,000 in the year ending March 2023, driven by a boom in study visas, work visas and humanitarian schemes for Ukraine and Hong Kong.
Successive Tory and Labour governments have since tightened on immigration rules in an effort to reduce net migration levels in an effort to improve social cohesion across the country and reset the UK economy.
Immigration of non-EU nationals was mainly for study-related reasons as 47 per cent arrived for university or other education studies.
More than one in eight arrivals (14 per cent) were asylum applicants while nearly a quarter (23 per cent) arrived for work.
Some of the main policies to tackle work-related and study-related immigration included hiking the salary threshold for sponsoring migrant workers to £41,700, reducing the standard length of a graduate visa to 18 months and imposing stricter English language rules.