A bad Q2 for student visas

The quarterly student visa released by the Home Office this morning gives us new figures for the months April to June of this year.

The separate monthly data on total applications only has already indicated that July 2026, a month with a much higher overall volume, saw a decrease in students applying for visas.

The second quarter of the year isn’t a blockbuster period for international recruitment when looking at the landscape from afar, but it gives us some insight into ongoing trends around nationality and refusal rates – though these may come as little surprise to those dealing with international admissions over the summer period.

Comparing the new three months to April-June 2025, we see that application volume was down around 31 per cent, from 58,293 to 40,107 – for reference, the third quarter in 2025 saw more than 266,000 applications.

We can now compare that to the drop in (main applicant) issuances for Q2, where the drop is even steeper – from 52,619 in 2025 to 29,289 in 2026, a fall of almost 45 per cent. You have to go back to 2021 to find a Q2 with fewer issued visas, as the chart below shows:

Refusals are ticking up, as are application withdrawals, as we’ve seen before – Jim’s analysis from Q1 still holds. But this is happening concurrently with a drop in applications, with certain nationalities particularly affected. For Pakistan main applicants, there were 6,161 study visa applications in Q2 2025. There were only 980 in Q2 2026.

Here are main applicant issuances over time, by nationality:

Here is the same chart for refusals:

Elsewhere we see that graduate route extensions dropped by 39 per cent to 157,356 in the year ending June 2026 compared to the previous year – reflecting the steep fall in the grants to dependants filtering through in the data.

The Home Office has continued to release more detailed data on asylum claims by visa holders. The spike in claims by student visa holders is well and truly over, with 1,317 in Q2 2026 (compared to around 3,000 in each quarter of 2025, which generated headlines and plenty of Home Office activity last year). The flipside of this is that claims from graduate route visa holders continues to be relatively high – 5,130 in the year ending June 2026, compared to 2,295 in the year ending June 2025. As graduate route extensions continue their current downward trend, this number is likely to come down as well.