Net migration to the UK in 2026 will fall to its lowest level since 1997, according to forecasts by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

The OBR expects net migration to fall to 120,000 this year, down from 171,000 in 2025 and 331,000 the year before.

Excluding the pandemic year of 2020 — when travel restrictions pushed net migration down to around 93,000 — the figures for this year would be the lowest since 1997, when net migration is estimated to have stood at 48,000. Net migration peaked at 924,000 in 2023.

The OBR attributes the projected decline to visa restrictions introduced in 2023, when then-Home Secretary James Cleverly raised the minimum income threshold for family visas and banned some visa holders from bringing family members to the UK. The 2026 net migration figures also reflect expected elevated levels of emigration, particularly among students and following “past high levels of immigration”, according to the OBR.

These figures come as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood seeks to impose tighter restrictions on migrants’ ability to claim permanent residence in the UK in a bid to bring down migration. Mahmood has suggested raising the time it takes for migrants to access Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) from five years to 10, and up to 15 years for those migrants who arrive on health and social care work visas.

Some in the Labour Party have criticised the reforms. Housing Secretary Angela Rayner voiced concerns with the plans, saying that they would unfairly “change the goalposts” if applied retrospectively to those already in the UK and awaiting ILR. London Mayor Sadiq Khan echoed those concerns, and called for “compassion” in the UK’s immigration system.

Despite the projected fall in net migration this year, the OBR expects the figure to “rise gradually” in the next few years, reaching a net figure of 230,000 by 2031. This is based on the assumption that outflows of British and EU nationals will slowly fall.

Total emigration from the UK has remained stable in recent years, according to the Office for National Statistics, with an estimated 246,000 British nationals leaving the UK in 2025. Migration to the UK has outstripped those leaving the country since 1994, meanwhile, with over 800,000 people migrating to the UK in 2025 and around 640,000 emigrating.

ONS figures also suggest that about 620,000 immigrants arriving to the UK in 2025 came from non-EU countries, down from 780,000 the previous year. Before Britain left the EU in 2016, EU citizens made up the majority of net migration to the country.

Forecasts by the ONS from April this year predicted that 2026 net migration levels would reach 138,000, slightly higher than the OBR’s prediction, but also significantly less than the ONS estimate of 204,000 for 2025.

The University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory has previously said it expected the years 2026 and 2027 to see “unusually low” net migration. This is because while immigration has decreased, emigration “remains temporarily high as some workers and students who arrived during the net migration spike of 2022 to 2023 leave”.