Brexit was supposed to end EU migration. The EU Settlement Scheme has confirmed 7.3 million.

The EU Settlement Scheme has issued 4,429,184 grants of settled status and 2,893,200 grants of pre-settled status since launching in 2018. The scheme closed for new applications on 30 June 2021. The Home Office is still issuing approximately 300,000 settled-status grants per year five years after closure. Brexit was supposed to end EU migration. The post-Brexit EU Settlement Scheme has confirmed permanent or near-permanent status for 7.32 million people.

The Home Office EUSS_D02 dataset, released 21 May 2026, gives the full annual flow:

Year	Settled status	Pre-settled status	Total concluded
2018 (pilot)	18,541	7,988	26,540
2019 (full launch)	1,416,295	997,333	2,424,258
2020	998,015	943,581	2,062,285
2021 (scheme closed 30 June)	694,184	558,895	1,544,448
2022	294,450	200,994	805,081
2023	317,911	98,592	736,623
2024	348,291	47,692	592,012
2025	267,977	33,942	467,889
2026 (Q1 only)	73,520	4,183	106,626

Cumulative all-time concluded applications: 8,765,762. The breakdown by outcome:

• Settled status: 4,429,184
• Pre-settled status: 2,893,200
• Refused: 834,609
• Invalid: 359,860
• Withdrawn or void: 248,909

The Conservative government’s pre-Brexit estimate of the EU+ resident population in the UK was approximately 3.6 million in 2017. The actual cohort that has applied and concluded through the EUSS is 8.77 million, of whom 7.32 million received settled or pre-settled status. The pre-Brexit estimate was approximately half of the eventual eligible cohort.

Why the scheme keeps producing grants

Three flows make up the post-closure activity.

Late applications continue to be accepted where the Home Office accepts “reasonable grounds” for late application. The 2022 to 2025 settled-status grants of 1.23 million are predominantly from this route. Reasonable grounds include serious illness, late awareness of the scheme, dependents being added late, and procedural issues.

Pre-settled status holders converting to settled status. Pre-settled status was granted to EU+ nationals who had been resident in the UK for less than five years at the application date. After five years of continuous residence they become eligible for settled status. The 2024 settled-status figure of 348,291 partly reflects 2019 to 2020 pre-settled holders reaching their five-year point and converting.

Non-EU family members of EU+ nationals applying via the EUSS family permit route. The top recent EUSS nationalities for 2024 to 2025 grants include India (44,488) and Pakistan (25,144), both substantially above any conventional EU+ figure. These are non-EU family members applying through the EUSS scheme’s family route.

What this does not count

EUSS grants do not appear in the Home Office headline net migration figure for any year. They are not “immigration” under the ONS LTIM definition because the people concerned were already in the UK at the time of application. They do not appear in the Home Office visa grants headline because EUSS is administered separately. They appear only in the EUSS dataset and the population denominators that downstream demographers and local-authority planners use.

This means the UK’s actual post-Brexit population profile differs materially from the pre-Brexit estimates. The Conservative-government 2017 estimate of around 3.6 million EU+ residents understated the eligible cohort by approximately 50 percent. The Romanian population alone is now over 1 million people resident, in a country whose pre-Brexit estimate was approximately 350,000.

The top nationalities

Top 10 EUSS nationalities for grants concluded 2024 to 2025 combined:

Nationality	Grants 2024 to 2025
Romania	339,233
Italy	100,268
Bulgaria	81,389
Poland	78,018
Portugal	76,043
Spain	68,233
India	44,488
Greece	26,595
France	25,400
Pakistan	25,144

Romania is the largest single nationality, by some distance. The Romanian cohort approximately doubled the pre-Brexit estimate. Italian, Polish, Bulgarian and Portuguese cohorts are also substantially larger than the pre-Brexit estimates suggested.

The political position

The 2016 Referendum campaign was fought partly on a “control of borders” framing. The post-Brexit EU Settlement Scheme has confirmed status for 7.32 million people who were already in the UK at the time of application. The scheme has been quietly successful as an administrative exercise. It has not produced a reduction in EU+ resident population because the resident population was always larger than the pre-Brexit estimate suggested.

The 2025 calendar year produced 302,000 new settled-status grants and 38,000 new pre-settled grants. Q1 2026 alone produced 78,000. The scheme that was supposed to be a one-off post-Brexit clean-up exercise is now an ongoing settled-status processing pipeline that produces more permanent residence outcomes per year than the entire Skilled Worker grant total.

Sources

• Home Office Immigration System Statistics, year ending March 2026 release (21 May 2026), EU Settlement Scheme detailed datasets (EUSS_D01, EUSS_D02, EUSS_D03)
• Migration Observatory analysis of EUSS exclusion from LTIM
• Pre-Brexit EU+ resident estimates from ONS and Home Office 2017 to 2018 publications
• 2021 Census EU+ resident population estimates