- 1.4 million foreign nationals on working-age benefits as total caseload forecast to exceed two million by 2030
- Spending on benefits and pensions for foreign nationals reaches an estimated £23 billion
- Landmark inquiry warns welfare has expanded “far beyond its founding principles of contribution and reciprocity”
Almost two million foreign nationals now receive benefits or the state pension, a landmark inquiry reveals today.
In the first analysis of its kind, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) finds that approximately 1.85 million non-British adults received at least one form of welfare support or state pension in 2025, adjusting for those receiving more than one form of support.
The number is forecast to exceed two million by 2030.
The analysis – using a combination of DWP, HMRC and Home Office data – estimates that £23 billion was spent in 2025 on benefits, pensions and child-related support received by foreign nationals.
This includes approximately £14.3 billion of working-age benefits, £2.9 billion of pension-related payments and £5.8 billion of child-related support (Child Benefit, free school meals and government-funded childcare). The child-related estimate is reduced to account for children in mixed-nationality households.
The total bill is forecast to reach almost £27 billion by 2030.
The findings are published in State of Dependency, a 250-page report and part one of the CSJ’s landmark Welfare 2030 inquiry, chaired by former Work and Pensions Secretary Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP.
The analysis indicates that around 1.4 million foreign nationals currently receive working-age benefits, forecast to reach approximately 1.5 million by 2030.
The number of foreign nationals on Universal Credit has increased by 38 per cent since April 2022 alone, to 1.3 million, including 745,000 covered by the EU settlement scheme and 537,000 migrants from outside the European Economic Area. The latter group has almost doubled over the same period.
The inquiry also presents new estimates of the rise of health-related claims. Around 200,000 foreign nationals now receive disability benefits (including Personal Independence Payment and Disability Living Allowance), with 200,000 receiving sickness benefits (the estimate, based on official figures, including both Universal Credit health and Employment and Support Allowance).
An estimated 400,000 foreign nationals receive the state pension, while around 76,000 receive Pension Credit – an income-related benefit for pensioners on low incomes worth around £4,500 a year on average.
The report finds that the increase in benefit claims has accompanied the unprecedented rise in immigration seen in recent years. Most people arriving on visas are initially subject to “no recourse to public funds”, but access can expand after migrants secure indefinite leave to remain, through exemptions and other routes including the EU Settlement Scheme.
The report warns that many of these costs emerge beyond the five-year forecast period used for the Government’s main fiscal and immigration policy decisions, which is when many foreign nationals become eligible for benefits.
It concludes that migration and welfare policy must be reformed together, given the rising cost of the current system, to focus policymakers and employers on helping the domestic workless population, and to ensure the system protects the principle that migrants should be able to support themselves and their families.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith said:
“Britain’s immigration and welfare systems were founded on the expectation that those arriving here should be able to support themselves and their families.
“But at a time when families and businesses are being clobbered with yet more taxes, many will be deeply concerned at the extent to which governments have let unconstrained immigration drive up the welfare bill.
“We must urgently now restore contribution and reciprocity to the welfare system while helping the millions of Brits on out-of-work benefits back towards a better future for themselves and their families. We have done this before, we can do it again.”
The State of Dependency report found that 6.7 million people now receive at least one out-of work-benefit, around one in six working-age adults.
It identified 3,369 “welfare hotspots” – collectively home to nearly 900,000 people, a population larger than Leeds – where out-of-work claimant numbers exceed half of the working-age population.
The report also revealed that, since January 2020, non-EU nationals accounted for 2.1 million new payroll jobs, while payrolled jobs going to British nationals fell by 186,000. The out-of-work benefit caseload rose by 2.3 million over the same period.
The total working-age benefit bill is set to reach £136.1 billion in 2026/27 – almost £50 billion higher in real terms than in 2019/20.
Notes to editors
State of Dependency: How a broken benefit system is holding Britain back is the first report from the Centre for Social Justice’s Welfare 2030 inquiry. It was published on Tuesday 13 October 2026.
The CSJ estimates combine Department for Work and Pensions administrative data, the Family Resources Survey, Home Office Migrant Journey data and published benefit caseloads and rates. We first estimated the number of foreign nationals in the UK using the 2025 EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) total and Leave to Remain (LR) and Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) cohorts. We then used the Family Resources Survey (FRS) to estimate the proportion of foreign nationals claiming each benefit or benefit-in-kind and compared our estimates to administrative data and a Freedom of Information request (FOI2026/83815 17). We applied FRS estimates of the overlap between DWP benefit cases to reduce caseload calculations to claimant numbers. For succeeding years, we uplifted the 2025 caseloads and expenditure based on the FRS and FOI for each subsequent year to reflect LR, ILR, and EUSS inflows and outflows based on the Migrant Journey dataset.
The 1.85 million estimate covers foreign nationals and adjusts for cases receiving more than one award. Where benefits are claimed on a household basis, we calculate the number of adults in the household and, for the small number of mixed households assume that half the adults are foreign nationals. The estimate includes recipients of working-age benefits, the state pension and pension-related benefits (but excludes Child Benefit, free school meals and government-funded childcare, which are included only in the spending estimate).
The £23 billion estimate covers benefits, pensions and child-related support associated with foreign nationals. Unlike the caseload estimate, it includes working-age benefits, pension-related payments, Child Benefit, free school meals and government-funded childcare. Child-related expenditure estimates are reduced to account for mixed-nationality households.
For benefits without a published nationality breakdown, receipt rates drawn from the Family Resources Survey were applied to the relevant population. Costs were calculated using average awards or published benefit rates.
Table 1. Key foreign national benefit caseloads and expenditure, 2025
| Benefit | Estimated caseload | Estimated expenditure |
| Universal Credit* | 1.3 million | £11.9 billion |
| Employment and Support Allowance | 36,000 | £238 million |
| Carer’s Allowance | 62,000 | £267 million |
| Personal Independence Payment | 180,000 | £1.4 billion |
| Disability Living Allowance | 18,000 | £117 million |
| Attendance Allowance | 45,000 | £230 million |
| State pension | 400,000 | £2.1 billion |
| Pension Credit | 76,000 | £343 million |
* Universal Credit expenditure covers the full award, including standard, housing and health elements. Figures are rounded. Individual benefit caseloads overlap and should not be added together