India tops every UK migration league table. The Free Trade Agreement officially changes nothing.

India is the top source of UK migration on every measure published. The UK-India Free Trade Agreement, signed 24 July 2025, did not create any of this. The pattern was structural before the FTA and continues after it.

Indian nationals in 2025, drawn from the May 2026 Home Office release and the DWP Stat-Xplore rolling year:

Measure	India 2025	Rank
Work visa grants	15,982	1st
Student visa grants	95,060	1st
Citizenship grants 2024 to 2025 combined	47,257	1st
NINo registrations rolling year	129,772	1st
Returns from the UK	10,388	1st
EU Settlement Scheme grants 2024 to 2025	44,488	1st non-EU
Asylum claims	5,751	7th

The asylum row is the awkward data point. Indian nationals in 2025 made 5,751 asylum claims with a 2.7 percent initial grant rate and a 7.6 percent true grant rate after appeals. The world’s largest functioning democracy supplies, in volume, the seventh-largest UK asylum cohort. Nearly all are refused at both initial and appeal stages.

The FTA

The UK-India Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement was signed in London on 24 July 2025. The visa-mobility chapter delivers:

• Existing business-visitor, intra-corporate transferee, contractual service supplier and independent professional visa categories locked into the agreement
• No new visa route
• No change to settlement eligibility for any category
• No exemption from the Skilled Worker income threshold (now £38,700 minimum salary)
• No exemption from the family visa £29,000 threshold

The Migration Watch UK editorial line on the FTA was that it “punishes working Brits” by locking in Indian mobility provisions. The official UK government line, repeated in the Department for Business and Trade explainer document, is that the deal “is not expected to have a long-term impact on net migration.” Both are technically correct because the deal does not change the volume of migration. It confirms the rules under which migration was already happening.

What is actually driving the volume

Three separate pipelines, none of which depend on the FTA, drive the Indian numbers.

The Skilled Worker route. Indian nationals are the largest single nationality, capturing the IT, finance, healthcare and academic professional flows that the UK explicitly designed the route to attract. 15,982 Indian Skilled Worker grants in 2025 do not need an FTA. The UK was already issuing them under the points-based system introduced in 2020 to 2021.

The Student visa route. Indian nationals (95,060) and Chinese nationals (86,350) together accounted for approximately 46 percent of all UK study visa grants in 2025. The Graduate route allows two years of post-study work without sponsorship. This is the bridge from student to settled employment.

The citizenship grants flow. The 47,257 Indian recipients across 2024 to 2025 reflect arrivals from five to ten years earlier becoming British. The cohort that arrived during the 2013 to 2018 Skilled Worker expansion is now naturalising.

These three flows compound. The Indian nationals receiving citizenship in 2024 to 2025 are the Skilled Worker arrivals of 2017 to 2019. The Skilled Worker arrivals of 2024 to 2025 will be the citizens of 2029 to 2030. The student visa grants of 2024 to 2025 will be the Graduate-route workers of 2026 to 2027.

The 1.86 million baseline

The 2021 Census recorded approximately 1.86 million UK residents with Indian ethnic identity. The number has grown since. NINo registrations alone added approximately 120,000 to 130,000 working-age Indian adults per year through 2024 and 2025. Student-route arrivals add 95,000 a year. Even at conservative settle-here rates, the Indian-British population is on track to be approximately 2.5 to 3 million by 2031.

This is the second-largest single-origin minority population in the UK after Pakistani-British (1.6 million in 2021 Census), and on current trajectories will overtake it during the late 2020s.

The political question

Indian dominance of UK migration is the largest single bilateral flow in the system, and it is openly designed for. The political question is not whether the UK should reduce it. The political question is whether the UK should be explicit that approximately one in five new UK arrivals is Indian and structure the immigration system around that fact, or continue to pretend the system is country-blind when it is not.

The Skilled Worker visa, the Student visa, the Graduate route, the citizenship-after-five-years pathway, and the new FTA business-mobility chapter are individually country-blind on paper. Collectively, they produce a UK migration system in which India is first on every measure and has been for the last five years.

The data was published in the Home Office Immigration System Statistics for year ending March 2026, released 21 May 2026.

Sources

• Home Office Immigration System Statistics, year ending March 2026 release (21 May 2026)
• DWP Stat-Xplore NINo registrations rolling year ending Q4 2025
• UK Government Department for Business and Trade, UK-India FTA business mobility explainer (24 July 2025)
• Migration Watch UK editorial commentary (May 2025)
• Office for National Statistics, Census 2021 ethnic group dataset