Five years after the UK formally left the European Union, net migration from EU countries has fallen to its lowest level on record.
EU net migration has remained negative since December 2022, with new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing a record net loss of 70,000 people by the end of June 2025.
The latest data underlines a radical reversal over the past decade, as in December 2016, net migration from EU countries reached a record high of 256,000.
At the same time, non-EU net migration has almost quadrupled over the past five years, pointing to a fundamental shift in the shape of migration to the UK.
The ONS said in its analysis: “Non-EU nationals drove the large increases in immigration between 2020 and 2023.”
Net non-EU migration peaked at more than one million in December 2023.
The rise was largely driven by an increase in Graduate and Skilled Worker visas in the health and care sector, according to Home Office Immigration Statistics.
The fall of the EU net migration began around the time of the EU referendum in 2016 with a decline of almost 12%, before accelerating as free movement for EU nationals ended when the UK left the EU in 2020.
Marcello, an Italian citizen living in London, arrived in September 2015, months before the Brexit referendum, to complete a master’s degree in music at Guildhall.
Less than a year later, on 23 June 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU: a day he recalls vividly.
He said: “It was a shock. Everyone was surprised and worried.
“It felt like the beginning of a new era in history, and not a pretty one. We had no idea what we were getting into.”
In the years following the referendum, Marcello, now a music teacher, felt a sort of Brexodus and watched London change as many foreign friends and clients left the city, often returning to their home countries or relocating elsewhere in Europe.
The Migration Observatory of the University of Oxford explained in a 2019 report that the Brexodus was more significant among eight European countries: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia.
But Marcello believes the more recent decline of EU net migration is no longer driven solely by Brexit and instead points to the combined effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of living crisis.
He said: “Some are finding life more and more difficult, especially in London, where the rents are higher than the rest of the country.
“People lost their jobs during the pandemic and have preferred to go back to their home country, which is perfectly understandable.”
The decline of the EU net migration also includes the fact that the end of the free movement implied that the EU nationals moving to the UK have either needed a visa, status on the EU Settlement Scheme, or indefinite leave to remain.
Among the top EU nationalities asking for work and student visas combined, the French are in first place, with 5,000 visas obtained by year on average since 2022.
Flore is a 22-year-old French graduate, who just completed a master’s degree at City, University of London and first planned to study in Britain in 2018.
Flore originally applied to King’s College London in September 2020, just months before the UK officially left the EU.
When she realised the changes would take effect in January 2021, her plans were thrown into doubt.
She said: “I knew about Brexit, but I didn’t realise visas would be introduced or that tuition fees would change so drastically for Europeans, or that we wouldn’t be able to access student loans anymore.
“All my plans crumbled. Brexit meant I would have to pay international fees, double what I expected, and I wouldn’t be eligible for a student loan.”
Although she briefly considered abandoning her plans, her parents agreed to support her financially.
She said: “I know I was lucky.”
Many others were not. Through online forums, Flore discovered that cost alone had forced many European students to abandon their studies in the UK.
She said: “In my degree, there was more than 200 students and I was the only European.”
She now regrets not travelling to the UK before the Brexit deadline to apply for pre-settled status, which allows EU citizens who lived in the country before 1 January 2021 to remain under more favourable conditions.
She said: “I have a Greek friend who arrived at the same time as me.
“The only difference is that she came to the UK for three days just before Brexit. She gave a hotel address to the Home Office and got pre-settled status.
“If I had known, I would have done the same and it would have saved me so much money.”
Despite having lived in London since September 2021, Flore said her future remains uncertain.
Her Graduate visa, which allows her to work, expires in August 2027 and she fears she will not meet the rising salary threshold required to obtain a sponsorship.
She said: “It’s incredibly frustrating. We come here, we pay huge amounts of money to universities, we want to stay and work and give back.
“But in return, it feels like we get nothing. It is more like: ‘Thanks for everything, but now go home’.”
Flore believes the UK risks losing an entire generation of European students.
She added: “If Europeans stop coming, universities will lose a major source of funding.
“At some point, you think you might as well go somewhere else, like the Netherlands, where courses are in English, the level is the same, and it’s much simpler because it’s still in the EU.”
The sharp fall in EU net migration raises questions about the long-term impact on the UK’s population.
Rob McNeil, deputy director of the Migration Observatory, said the effects remain difficult to predict.
He said: “The departure of Europeans is only going to have a marginal impact, even though we have got negative net migration of Europeans.
“But, it certainly will have an impact on those particular communities.
“Also, the non-European migration to the UK is made up of a very varied group, from very highly skilled, very high-income people coming to work in jobs in the NHS or the City of London, all the way through to quite substantial numbers of people coming to do things like work in the care sector.”
McNeil added that overall migration figures also include asylum seekers and students, whose length of stay is uncertain.
He said: “So it is very hard to provide a very precise answer of what one shift in the dynamics of migration will mean for the overall demography of the UK.”
Although net migration reached record levels until recently, McNeil noted that it is now declining sharply, with a net migration of 204,000 by June 2025, much lower than March 2023 with a record peak at 944,000, according to the last ONS data.
He said: “But these kinds of fluctuations are not the same as long-term trends.
“We can’t really predict what the future is going to hold geopolitically or indeed in terms of the impacts of policies that have been introduced more recently.”
A government spokesperson said: “We have been clear that European students and graduates will always be welcome in the UK. However, the student visa and subsequent graduate route are designed to be temporary routes for use by students and recent graduates and are not direct routes to settlement.
“Net migration is at its lowest level in half a decade and has fallen by more than two-thirds under this government. We will go further to bring numbers down, and the Home Secretary has set out fundamental reform to ensure those who come here contribute and put in more than they take out.”
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