Migration to the UK 2021 by nationality.

FOI REF: FOI/2023/4837

You asked

​​I would like to request a breakdown of the nationality of migrants into the UK last year. I would like to know the nationalities of all who migrated to the UK as well as the total number for each of the nationalities.

We said

Thank you for your Freedom of Information request.

In November 2022 we published the latest Long-term International Migration, year ending June 2022 estimates. These are experimental data and do not go down to individual countries to provide the detail you request. The provisional date for publication of the estimates to the end of 2022 is May 2023.

The most recent data about migration at individual country level would be from the 2021 Census. Our data is for England and Wales, as Scotland and Northern Ireland carry out their own census. They can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk and info@nisra.gov.uk respectively.

With regards to UK Census data, the publication of UK Census 2021 and 2022 outputs is dependent on the availability of Scotland's Census 2022 data.

Therefore, the only Census 2021 dataset currently available is for England and Wales only. Please see associated download named "Total number of UK Migrants 2021.xlsx" and the row highlighted "Migrant from outside the UK: Address one year ago was outside the UK" for relevant total number data.

The associate download "2021 Migration by country of birth" is from Census 2021 which may be of interest, although it does not indicate when a person arrived in the UK it does give a breakdown of the number of migrants from a particular country of birth living in the UK in 2021.

This data has been downloaded from the Nomis website. Nomis is a service run on behalf of the Office for National Statistics by Durham University. We are planning a more detailed country of birth classification for Phase 2 as we did for Census 2011 data. For an indication of timescales for Phase 2 and 3 releases, please see our Release plans webpage. Census 2021 datasets are also available on the Office for National Statistics website. Please see associated downloads "2021 Census Nomis navigation instructions" and "2021 ONS Navigation instructions" for detailed instructions on how to find data on both sites should you wish to explore census data further.

Multivariate data will be released during phase 2 of the Census 2021 outputs release schedule. Please see this release calendar entries for more information: Data combining multiple variables, England and Wales: Census 2021

When accessing any of our files please read the 'notes, terms and conditions' contained within them.

If you need anything further, please do not hesitate to contact us; census.customer.services@ons.gov.uk for Census enquires and pop.info@ons.gov.uk for international migration enquiries.