How many were granted indefinite leave to remain last year?published at 11:34 BST
11:34 BST
Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist
We’ve been looking at Reform UK’s proposal to end indefinite leave to remain.
Indefinite leave to remain – also known as “settlement” – gives migrants the right to live, work and study in the UK permanently.
To be given this immigration status migrants typically must have lived in the UK for five years on a qualifying visa, although under new government proposals this is set to double to 10 years for some people.
The number of settlement grants given to migrants by the UK government has been increasing since 2018.
The most recent figures show that there were 163,353 grants in the year ending June 2025, external, a rise of nearly a fifth compared with 138,074 in the same period last year.
The highest number of grants were given to people on work visas. There were 59,766 of these in the year to June, making up more than a third of all grants in this period.
There were more than two million people on temporary visas who had a path to settlement in the UK at the end of last year, according to estimates by the Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, external.
It did this analysis following the government’s announcement about changes to settlement back in May, saying at the time that “a lack of policy details and limited data make it impossible to produce a precise estimate of how many people will be affected”.
