Research and analysis

About this release

Published 27 November 2025

Applies to England and Wales

The Refugee Integration Outcomes (RIO) longitudinal cohort study is a joint data linking project between the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Finding robust quantitative data on refugee integration outcomes, particularly over the longer term, is challenging. Existing studies on refugee integration outcomes are scarce and often exhibit weaknesses in the robustness of their data. The project aims to link Home Office refugee data with other administrative data across government departments to create a comprehensive dataset of refugee outcomes to better inform our understanding of integration outcomes and provide a more robust evidence base for interventions by government and other providers.

1. Official Statistics in Development

These statistics are Official Statistics in Development (formerly known as “Experimental Statistics”). Official Statistics in Development may be new or existing statistics, and will be tested with users, in line with the standards of trustworthiness, quality, and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics. They are developed under the guidance of the Head of Profession for Statistics with the aim that they can, in due course, be produced to the standards of the Code.

Our statistical practice is regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) which sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to. You are welcome to contact us directly via refugeeintegrationoutcomes@homeoffice.gov.uk with any comments about how we meet these standards. Alternatively, you can contact OSR by emailing regulation@statistics.gov.uk or via the OSR website.

2. Groups covered by these statistics

These statistics cover refugees who were granted asylum in the UK and were residing in England or Wales in the period 2015 to 2023 and those who were resettled to the UK and residing in England or Wales via Vulnerable Persons and Vulnerable Children’s Resettlement Schemes (VPRS/VCRS), UK Resettlement Scheme (UKRS), or Afghan Citizen’s Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) Pathway 2 in the period 2015 to 2023. Those resettled under the VPRS/VCRS, UKRS, and ACRS Pathway 2 are collectively referred to as “resettled refugees”.

These groups represent a subset of refugees in England and Wales and conclusions from this study should not be used to make inferences about the wider refugee population or those granted other forms of protection. Official statistics on asylum and resettled refugees are available in regularly published Home Office Asylum and resettlement datasets.

These statistics do not include asylum seekers who were awaiting a decision on their asylum application, asylum seekers who were granted any other type of protection or leave to remain, or asylum seekers who received a negative decision.

2.1 Asylum refugees

Asylum refugees are individuals who arrived in the UK and subsequently applied for and were granted asylum and refugee status. Asylum seekers may have arrived in the UK via an irregular route without permission to enter, or via a regular route such as a visa then subsequently claimed asylum.

Here we only considered those who were granted refugee status. This cohort excludes those still awaiting a decision on their asylum claim, or those who were denied asylum.

Many asylum refugees are young adults (see Home Office Asylum and resettlement datasets), with approximately one-third being female and two-thirds male. The majority of the asylum refugee population in these statistics is from Iran, Eritrea, Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan. Further data for asylum refugees is available in regularly published HO Asylum and resettlement datasets.

2.2 VPRS/VCRS refugees

The UK government established the VPRS and VCRS to resettle vulnerable adult and child refugees. The VPRS was launched in 2014 for refugees displaced by the Syrian conflict and aimed at those in greatest need, including people requiring urgent medical treatment, survivors of violence and torture, and women and children at risk. The scheme aimed to resettle 20,000 people fleeing the conflict in Syria by March 2020.

The VCRS was launched in 2016 with the aim of resettling up to 3,000 at-risk children and their families from the Middle East and North Africa region. The region comprises 19 countries, including Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

By the time the schemes closed in February 2021, 20,319 individuals were resettled in the UK through the VPRS and a further 1,838 were resettled through the VCRS. Both schemes closed to new arrivals in February 2021 following lower numbers of new arrivals because of COVID-19-related travel restrictions.

By design, refugees resettled under the VPRS were primarily of Syrian nationality (91%). There were slightly higher proportions of males (52%) than females (48%), and half (50%) were aged 17 and under on arrival. This cohort includes more families with young children compared with asylum refugees. Further data for resettled refugees is available in regularly published Home Office (HO) Asylum and resettlement datasets.

2.3 UKRS refugees

The UKRS commenced on 25 February 2021, replacing the VPRS and VCRS. The UKRS aims to broaden its geographical focus beyond the Middle East and North Africa to expand resettlement to vulnerable refugees across the world.

2.4 ACRS Pathway 2

The ACRS commenced on 6 January 2022. Resettlement under the ACRS specifically focused on aiding those affected by events in Afghanistan, particularly those who were vulnerable, including refugees referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The ACRS aimed to resettle eligible individuals in the UK, offering them protection and support to rebuild their lives in the UK.

The ACRS was split into 3 pathways, but we only include those resettled via Pathway 2. Under Pathway 2, the UNHCR referred vulnerable refugees who had fled Afghanistan for resettlement to the UK. The UNHCR referred individuals in accordance with their standard resettlement submission criteria, which are based on an assessment of protection needs and vulnerabilities. The first arrivals under ACRS Pathway 2 were in the third quarter of 2022.

Presently, only ACRS Pathway 2 is in included due to its similarity to the VPRS/VCRS and UKRS - where referrals are received from UNHCR for resettlement - to ensure comparability of the groups of resettled refugees.

2.5 Demographic breakdown

The following table shows the demographic breakdown of those who were included in these statistics:

Table 1: Demographic breakdowns of those included in these statistics

Category	Counts
All	170,150
By arrival route
ACRS	80
Asylum refugees	150,845
UKRS	2,630
VPRS VCRS	16,595
By sex
Female	50,750
Male	119,365
By arrival route and sex
Asylum women	41,395
Asylum men	109,430
Resettled women	9,355
Resettled men	9,935
By nationality
Afghanistan	16,275
Albania	4,120
Eritrea	18,505
Iran	29,460
Iraq	8,550
Pakistan	7,290
Sri Lanka	4,740
Sudan	13,185
Syria	28,405
Other nationalities	39,620
By arrival year
2015	17,095
2016	18,120
2017	20,240
2018	19,080
2019	25,895
2020	12,805
2021	12,535
2022	16,445
2023	27,935

Further breakdowns of nationality by sex and year of arrival can be found in the accompanying data tables.

3. Linkage to HMRC data

Pay-As-You-Earn Real Time Information (PAYE-RTI) is a dataset covering every individual in the UK who pays income tax and national insurance through the PAYE system. As most UK employers use this system this dataset will cover a large proportion of the UK workforce. The dataset does not cover those who are self-employed.

Employers submit information about employees’ earnings, tax and other deductions under the PAYE system every time an employee is paid. For each wage payment to an employee by an employer, or proof of work reported by an employer, an RTI record will be recorded for the individual subject of the payment or proof of employment. PAYE information is also accompanied by 3 Frameworks tables. These tables provide information on the employers, citizens, and addresses. The employments framework is a database on employer and employments records holding information related to employees, taxpayers and individuals’ employments. The citizens framework contains historic and current basic personal details. The address framework contains addresses relevant to the business services that use it. PAYE-RTI doesn’t collect information on:

• employees on an employer’s payroll where all are paid less than tax and NI thresholds in each pay period
• secure and sensitive employees (spread across many schemes); they are returned but stripped out of PAYE RTI analytical feeds by HMRC, as well as certain secure PAYE schemes
• employers unable to make an online return or who are exempt, where returns are made using ‘paper’ returns with HMRC keeping electronic records of the included information

PAYE-RTI data tables are provided at 3 different levels: employee, payment and scheme. These tables were reconciled and transformed to provide a record per individual per tax year; collating information provided by employers (for example, income amount, employment spells) to derive tax-year totals and indicators for greater utility of the data. For example, if an individual was paid monthly throughout a tax year these records were amalgamated to create one record for the given tax year. Once reconciled, the PAYE-RTI data tables were linked together using HMRC’s unique IDs to create one PAYE-RTI table.

We have linked Home Office refugee data with HMRC PAYE-RTI data covering the tax years ending March 2015 to March 2024. PAYE-RTI was linked to the RIO cohorts using deterministic linkage algorithms to match personal identifiable information between the datasets. A series of match keys were created using name, sex, date of birth, and postcode information. National Insurance number was not used as a matching variable during this process.

A total of 24 different match key combinations were used, becoming less strict as you progress through the series. A sample of the match keys are provided in Table 2. For quality assurance purposes a 10% sample of matches were sent for clerical review. Over 90% of the sample were confirmed as matches.

Table 2: A sample of matchkeys to link Home Office refugee data to PAYE-RTI

Matchkey	Inconsistency resolved by matchkey
FULL NAME | SEX | DOB | POSTCODE	Full match
UNORDERED NAME | LAST NAME | SEX | DOB | POSTCODE	Allows for names to be reported in a different order
FULL NAME | DOB | POSTCODE	Gender missing
FULL NAME | SEX | DOB | POSTCODE AREA	Allows for differences in the postcode district, sector and unit
FIRST NAME | LAST NAME (Edit distance >.07) | SEX | DOB | POSTCODE	Missing middle name and allows for edit differences in last name

We have used PAYE-RTI variables to determine if someone was in employment each year and how many years that was after they were granted refugee status. Note that these statistics do not account for the length of time in employment. If there was a PAYE-RTI entry for a year, we considered an individual to be in employment. If there was no PAYE-RTI entry for a year, we considered the individual to not be in employment for that year. Note that those considered unemployed may include those who are not able to work due to disability or long-term illness and would otherwise be considered economically inactive. PAYE-RTI can only tell us about employment. It cannot tell us about self-employment. If someone did not have a record in the PAYE-RTI dataset, we considered them not employed but that does not necessarily mean they were not working.

However, we could not distinguish between those who did not have an entry because they were not in employment and those who had not entry because they could not be matched to the PAYE-RTI dataset. The linkage rates to the PAYE-RTI dataset for the various refugee cohorts are outlined in Table 3. Low linkage rates mean we could be missing people in employment. As most of these cohorts are mostly made up of working age men and women, statistics should be interpreted with caution.

Table 3: Linkage rates of different refugee cohorts aged 16 and over to the HMRC PAYE-RTI dataset

Refugee cohort	Percentage of records linked
Asylum refugees	56%
VPRS / VCRS	29%
UKRS and ACRS Pathway 2	21%

3.1 Measuring years since being granted refugee status

We derived a “years since being granted refugee status” variable. This variable is the difference between the year someone was granted asylum for those who arrived in the UK and were processed through the asylum system or the year of arrival in the UK for those who arrived via a resettlement scheme taken and the year an entry from the PAYE-RTI dataset was recorded.

Where we have disaggregated by number of years since being granted refugee status, this refers to the difference in calendar years. For example, when we measure 0 years after arrival, an individual may have been a refugee in the UK for one to 11 months at that point.

3.2 Age categories

These statistics focus on those of working age (16 to 64 years). There are also breakdowns by age category. We used the age someone was at each year since being granted refugee status to account for the fact that people will age into and out of the 16 to 64 years age bracket and between age categories over time (age categories are dynamic). This is not the same as the age category someone was when they were granted refugee status.

3.3. Employment before refugee status

These analyses use the year a refugee was granted refugee status. For those who were granted asylum, this may not necessarily be the same year they arrived in the UK since they will have spent some time going through the asylum process. For resettled refugees (those who arrived under the VPRS/VCRS, UKRS, and ACRS Pathway 2 schemes), this year will be the same year they arrived in the UK, since they would not have been in the UK prior to the process of resettling them. Once an individual has been granted refugee status, they are eligible to work in the UK.

We created a flag in the data for those who had a PAYE-RTI entry in a year before their year of arrival. Those who appeared in the dataset before their year of arrival are likely to have been in the UK on a visa and allowed to work in the UK then subsequently obtained refugee status through a successful asylum claim. Of those included in the dataset, 4.2% were found to have been employed in years before their year of arrival. These individuals were included in the analysis, but we did not consider their employment before they were granted refugee status. Source of asylum claims data is not currently included in the RIO dataset.

3.4 Median annual earnings

The statistics on median annual earnings are unadjusted and reflect the values reported in the PAYE-RTI dataset. As a statistical disclose control measure, all earnings values were rounded to the nearest £1,000 and values over £50,000 were rounded to £50,000 prior to analysis.

4. Further information and feedback

If you have any comments, or suggestions for the development of this report, please provide feedback by emailing refugeeintegrationoutcomes@homeoffice.gov.uk. Please include the words ‘PUBLICATION FEEDBACK’ in the subject of your email.

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