At the end of June 2026, the Home Office reported 40,168 people waiting for an initial asylum decision. It was supporting 93,293. Both figures belong in an account of the system, but they answer different questions.
The first follows a decision queue. The second counts people receiving asylum support. Those populations overlap in ways the headline totals do not explain. Add the two together and the result has no useful meaning.
There is another distinction to watch. The 40,168 people awaiting an initial decision relate to 32,401 cases. Changing “people” to “cases” in a headline changes what the number says.
Where support is being provided
Of the 93,293 people receiving support on 30 June 2026, 16,021 were in hotels and 73,068 in non-hotel accommodation. A further 4,204 received subsistence only. The Atlas brings the local-authority workbook together under those headings; its national totals match the published Home Office bulletin.
The local figures use registered addresses. They let readers examine the recorded distribution of asylum support across councils. They do not identify individual people or hotel addresses, and they cannot tell us what effect accommodation has had on a neighbourhood.
There is no population denominator in this collection, so it makes no per-capita comparison. Council totals alone cannot show where the number receiving support is highest relative to the resident population.
The missing part of the account
The initial-decision queue is only one stage of the process. To establish the complete current caseload, we would also need to know about cases awaiting appeal outcomes and removal.
The Home Office says that breakdown is unavailable after June 2024 while it moves to a new caseworking system. That is a documented gap in publication. A figure for the first decision queue cannot fill it.
This collection does not yet contain a Cartulary information request about that gap. For now, anyone making a claim about the size of the whole current caseload should be asked which records support it.
Explore asylum support by local authority. The figures can be checked against the Home Office bulletin and our extraction method.
