We’ve been looking at Home Office monthly data on student visa applications since the department began to publish in this way – most recently on the site here, when December student main applicant applications were higher than the same month in 2023. January’s figures then saw a 12.5 per cent increase on the previous year.

And today brings news of a third straight improvement, with February 2025 main applicant applications at 6,500, compared to 3,700 in February 2024. Now while a 75.7 per cent increase might sound like reason for celebration, these are very small numbers when considering the year as a whole – February is not a peak recruitment period by a long stretch. But it’s increasingly starting to look like an upwards trend.

In covering the monthly figures we’ve generally avoided lumping in what’s been happening with student dependants, as their precipitous fall since changes to visa rules has distorted the totals. But with a legal migration white paper looming, it’s worth taking the time to go through where we’re currently at.

To recap, since January 2024 those on student visas have only been permitted to bring dependants if they are taking a PhD or research-based higher degree, or if they are sponsored by their own government. To be precise, this is for courses which began on or after 1 January, so some of the dependant applications in 2024 will be via students who had already started up a taught master’s in 2023.

Here’s what has happened over the last few years with monthly applications for dependants of students:

	2022	2023	2024	2025
January	11,000	17,500	3,400	2,300
February	6,800	7,500	1,700	1,000
March	6,000	7,900	1,600
April	5,200	6,000	1,600
May	5,300	7,800	1,400
June	8,000	9,100	1,400
July	14,800	12,300	2,000
August	23,600	25,100	2,400
September	18,300	22,500	2,300
October	10,200	12,000	1,300
November	14,800	9,700	1,300
December	19,800	8,000	2,200
Total	143,800	145,400	22,600

The impact is immediately apparent, and it’s also worth stressing that initial 2025 figures are slightly down on the same months in 2024 – though, as above, it’s hard to make a clear-cut judgement on how many dependant visa applications in early 2024 relate to 2023 student visas.

The data the Home Office publish on dependants is not great – we can’t see things like level of study or institution type as we can with main applicants. But we can see what happened by nationality – the table below shows visa issuances rather than applications, from the more detailed quarterly data.

	2023 Q1	2023 Q2	2023 Q3	2023 Q4	2024 Q1	2024 Q2	2024 Q3	2024 Q4
India	11,817	5,914	13,224	8,446	1,566	631	703	546
Pakistan	3,743	2,114	6,232	5,285	1,120	390	494	633
Nigeria	17,193	7,753	19,431	9,073	3,349	1,507	2,120	1,250
Total	39,951	20,740	53,593	28,983	7,907	3,767	6,302	4,000

There’s been a particular drop-off in dependants accompanying students from India – from 25–30 per cent of the total in early 2023 to 10–15 per cent by the end of 2024. The three countries above represent the most dependants, but their share of the total has decreased somewhat – Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, and Ghana were among those nationalities accounting for proportionally more dependants in 2024, though the absolute numbers have dropped significantly everywhere since the policy change.

Given that there are still dependants coming, what else do we know about the students they are accompanying? Some will be doctoral research students, some will be government-sponsored, some (though increasingly few as time passes) will be dependants of taught master’s students whose courses started before 2024. And some will be on those (non-doctoral) “research-based higher degrees” where students are still permitted to bring dependants under the new policy, which refers to programmes such as a research master’s (MRes, MPhil).

Sadly there is no good way to dig any deeper to get a clearer picture. Which is a shame, as there is currently some chatter about the “rise in MRes” since the dependants ban for PGT – but the available data is both too limited and too time-lagged to really tell us anything, especially when you consider that research degrees are not always awarded by the institution doing the recruiting. Universities pivoting towards other forms of research degrees in their international recruitment offers did always feel like something that would follow from a taught master’s ban (look, here’s me saying so in January 2023).

But it feels important to get a clearer picture, as student visas continue to be such a political battlefield. Especially when within government, according to Universities UK International,

… there is a live discussion about the proportion of graduates who remain in the UK, and about other elements of the student visa system, including renewed concern about the marketing of some MRes courses as a route to bring dependants.

While the monthly data doesn’t show an uptick in student dependants – and unpicking any rise in MRes course offerings or international MRes students will always be a struggle to do in sector data – you just need to search on Youtube, Tiktok or Instagram for phrases like “bring your dependents along” to see just how often a research master’s is the focus.

Whether “renewed concern” within the Home Office translates into action could be one of the international education stories to watch over the coming months.