Forced from home

This count starts in 1951 with 2,116,011 refugees, and for its first forty-two years that is all it holds. Asylum-seekers and people displaced inside their own country were first counted in 1993, and people "in need of international protection" only in 2018. Some of the rise below is the world getting worse. Some of it is the counting getting wider.

refugees   asylum-seekers   others needing international protection   displaced inside their own country

How to read this: one column per year, 1951 on the left. The three orange bands are people who crossed a border, with refugees in the strongest orange at the bottom; the teal band at the top is people displaced inside their own country. Each band starts where its group was first counted, and to the left of that line, nobody was adding those people up.

The clearest example is 2006. That year UNHCR was formally given responsibility for people displaced inside their own countries, and the number of countries reporting them went from 16 to 24. The world total doubled in twelve months, from 6,616,791 to 12,794,268. Nobody thinks twice as many people were displaced in 2006 as in 2005. The counting changed.

Of the ten places with most people displaced inside them today, only 2 were being counted before the year 2000. The rest arrive in the record one at a time: Sudan from 2004, Colombia from 2000, Syria from 2012. In every case the displacement was already happening when the counting found it.

People who flee their country do not go far. Of the 42,782,258 people living outside their own country whose home country is recorded, 41 in every 100 are in one single country (the nearest, or the easiest, or the most willing), and 73 in every 100 are in just three.

the country hosting most   the second   the third   everywhere else

1. VenezuelaColombia, 37%
2. UkraineGermany, 22%
3. SyriaTürkiye, 47%
4. AfghanistanIran, 41%
5. SudanChad, 35%
6. South SudanUganda, 41%
7. MyanmarBangladesh, 74%
8. Democratic Republic of the CongoUganda, 48%

How to read this: one row per country people have left, longest row first. Each square is 100,000 people. The strongest orange is the one country hosting most of them, then the second and third in paler orange, and the grey squares are everywhere else in the world put together.

This is the part most often missed. The countries taking in the most people are almost always the ones next door, and they are rarely the rich ones.

the United States hosts more people who crossed a border than any other country: 4,176,592. But it is a country of 347.3 million people, so that is one person in every 83. In Lebanon it is one in every 11.

people who crossed a border into the country

How to read this: the same year counted two ways. On the left, how many people a country hosts. On the right, how many that is for every 1,000 people already living there. Hardly any country is near the top of both.

The heaviest weight of all is not carried by hosts, but by countries whose own people cannot get out. In Syria, 5,542,227 people are displaced inside the country: about 22 in every 100 people living there.

Most people displaced inside their own country, per 1,000 living there

people displaced inside their own country

1. Syria216.3
2. Sudan176.9
3. Somalia170.3
4. Colombia134.0
5. Haiti120.2
6. Yemen114.8
7. South Sudan104.8
8. Ukraine95.2
9. Burkina Faso85.7
10. Afghanistan73.0
11. Myanmar66.2
12. Azerbaijan63.2

An asylum-seeker has crossed a border and asked to be recognised as a refugee. In 2025, 2,505,045 people asked another country for asylum for the first time. The most in any year on record was 2023: 3,580,371.

people asking for asylum for the first time

How to read this: one column per year, 2006 to 2025. The taller the column, the more people asked for asylum that year. Before 2006 the reports do not say which requests were new and which were appeals, so those years are not drawn.

The columns count people. The United States counted part of its claims as cases instead, a whole family as one, in every year from 2006 to 2020, and again in 2025 (291,558 cases that year). A case is not a person, so those are left out rather than added in, and those years' columns are lower than the truth.

Where people asked, 2025

1. United States629,358most from Venezuela: 23 of every 100
2. Egypt292,007most from Sudan: 91 of every 100
3. Spain144,387most from Venezuela: 59 of every 100
4. Italy126,621most from Bangladesh: 22 of every 100
5. Canada117,354most from Haiti: 15 of every 100
6. Germany113,216most from Afghanistan: 21 of every 100
7. France111,343most from Ukraine: 11 of every 100
8. United Kingdom100,620most from Pakistan: 11 of every 100
9. Democratic Republic of the Congo99,377most from the Central African Republic: 65 of every 100
10. Brazil75,585most from Cuba: 55 of every 100

How to read this: the ten countries where most people asked for asylum for the first time in 2025, and where the largest group of them came from. The United States figure leaves out its 282,594 cases.

Rich countries fill most of the list, but not all of it. Egypt was second: 91 of every 100 people who asked there came from Sudan, next door. People ask for safety where they can reach it, as they do everywhere on this page.

Whether the answer is yes depends, more than on anything else, on where a person comes from. Of every 100 people from Sudan whose claims were decided in 2025, 92 were given protection. Of every 100 from Bangladesh, 8.

given refugee status   given another kind of protection   refused

1. Everyone decided in 202543 of 100 protected
   1,538,268 decided
2. Afghanistan74 of 100 protected
   152,746 decided
3. Türkiye17 of 100 protected
   103,126 decided
4. Venezuela81 of 100 protected
   91,522 decided
5. Colombia15 of 100 protected
   60,507 decided
6. Bangladesh8 of 100 protected
   58,702 decided
7. Pakistan27 of 100 protected
   45,190 decided
8. Sudan92 of 100 protected
   44,576 decided
9. Eritrea88 of 100 protected
   41,343 decided
10. Democratic Republic of the Congo47 of 100 protected
    40,686 decided
11. Cameroon76 of 100 protected
    36,879 decided
12. Iran51 of 100 protected
    35,598 decided
13. Syria48 of 100 protected
    35,266 decided

How to read this: each block is 100 people whose claims were decided in 2025: the whole world first, then the 12 countries whose people had the most decisions. Blue squares were given protection, grey squares were refused.

There are two kinds of yes. Refugee status is the protection written in the 1951 Refugee Convention, for a person persecuted for who they are or what they believe. Another kind of protection is given to people who would be in danger if they were sent back (from a war, say) but do not fit the Convention's words. Most people from Venezuela who were protected got the second kind.

Not in these blocks: 862,632 people whose claims ended in 2025 with neither a yes nor a no: they withdrew, could not be found, or were sent to another country to be decided there. And the answer changes over time: of everyone decided, the share protected was highest in 2016 (60 of 100) and lowest in 2003 (28).

Displaced people are not a cross-section of the world. They are much younger, and not only because more children are born where wars happen. Old people are missing. Of every 100 displaced people whose age is recorded, 7 are aged 60 or over. Of every 100 people alive, 15 are.

How to read this: each square is one person in a hundred. The two columns ask the same two questions of displaced people and of everybody alive in 2025.

41 in every 100 displaced people are children, against 29 in the world at large. But the sharper gap is at the other end of life: a displaced person is less than half as likely to be over 60 as someone picked at random from the world. Older people are the least able to leave, and the least likely to survive leaving.

This describes the 62 in every 100 displaced people whose age UNHCR records. "60 or over" is UNHCR's own band, not the "65 or over" used elsewhere on this site, and the world figure is mid-2025 while UNHCR's is the end of the year.

Going home does not happen steadily. It happens in bursts, when a war ends or a border closes. In 2025, 4,362,272 refugees went home, more than in any year since 1972, and 10,308,567 people returned to their homes inside their own country, the most in the 29 years UNHCR has published that count.

refugees who went home   one mis-recorded entry, cut off

How to read this: one column per year, 1959 on the left. The taller the column, the more refugees went home that year. The two pale columns in the early 1970s are a single mis-recorded entry for the return to Bangladesh, drawn cut off because otherwise it would flatten every other year.

Two things drove 2025. Afghans were expelled in very large numbers from Iran and Pakistan (Afghanistan to Iran alone accounts for 1,386,970 people), and Syrians began returning after the government fell at the end of 2024. Going home is not always a choice.

The other way out is for another country to offer a permanent place. That is called resettlement, and it is rare. Across the whole record 53,976,271 refugees have gone home and 5,708,274 have been resettled, 9 going home for every one resettled. In 2025 resettlement fell by 57%, from 188,759 places to 81,766.

• These are the people UNHCR counts. Its figure for people displaced inside their own country covers only those it works with. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre publishes a larger total on a wider definition. Its terms of use are not settled for a site like this one, so that number is named here and never drawn.
• Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA are not in this count. They are the responsibility of a different UN agency, with its own register going back to 1952, and they are in no figure on this page.
• 1,854,618 people who crossed a border have no home country recorded. Most of that is one change in how the United States reported its waiting asylum cases in 2025, not people moving. They are left out of every figure here arranged by where people came from.
• Nearly four in ten of the detailed records carry no age. The age figures above describe the 62 in 100 that do.
• These are snapshots taken at the end of each year. Somebody who fled in March and was home by October appears nowhere on this page.
• Stateless is not the same as displaced. 4,477,220 people are recorded as having no nationality at all. Most have never moved anywhere, and none of them are counted in the 108,876,228 above.
• Asylum is counted in people — mostly. A few countries count some claims as cases, a family as one; the United States does so for most of the years drawn here. Cases are never added to people, so those years are undercounted. Before 2006 the reports do not separate new claims from appeals at all.
• Counts, not estimates. Everything here is a tally of records, so nothing is projected and nothing carries a margin of error. What it carries instead is gaps: a country that does not report is simply absent.

Every figure on this page is a count published by UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency, reading the end of each year from 1951 to 2025. The population figures behind "per 1,000 people" are the UN's own for 2025, and countries are matched by their three-letter code rather than by name, because the same country is spelled several ways across these files.

Who is counted as what

A refugee has left their country and been recognised as needing protection. An asylum-seeker has left and asked, but has not been given an answer yet. Somebody displaced inside their own country has been driven from home without crossing a border. Others needing international protection is a group added in 2018, and is mostly Venezuelans living elsewhere in South America.

Three columns this page never adds in

UNHCR also counts the host community: the people already living where the displaced arrived, 26.7 million of them in 2025, who are not displaced at all. It counts stateless people, most of whom have not moved. And it keeps a residual column called "others of concern", 3.0 million in 2025, which fell by 93% in a single year when people were reclassified out of it, so it describes paperwork rather than a population. None of the three is in any total on this page.

Asylum: what is counted

New claims are the ones reported as new, including a few countries that report new claims and repeats, or new claims and appeals, as one number because they cannot separate them. Appeals and repeated claims are left out, so a person is not counted twice for asking twice. Only claims counted in people are used; claims counted as cases are measured and named, never added. "Protected" is UNHCR's own measure: refugee status plus other protection, out of everyone given a yes or a no. Decisions at every stage are included, so one person can be decided twice in a year (once and again on appeal), and a decision made in 2025 is often on a claim from an earlier year.

Going home: what is counted

Refugees going home are recorded from 1959. People going home inside their own country are not: UNHCR began publishing that count only in 1997, so it covers 29 years. Every earlier year is empty because nobody was counting, not because nobody went home, and no figure on this page compares 1997 onwards with anything before it.

The 1972 record

The largest single value in the whole returns file is 11,833,920 people across 1971 and 1972, the return to Bangladesh after the war of 1971, filed against the wrong country, with the host recorded as "unknown". It is 22% of every return ever recorded. It is drawn on this page, marked, and excluded from anything arranged by country.

Sources: UNHCR · country code lists · UN WPP 2024. Every source, its licence and how to cite it →

Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries