Wonkhe has been covering the new Home Office visa application monthly releases since they began in April – here’s last month’s instalment for reference. We’ve been repeatedly stressing that it’s hard to conclusively read into the numbers for the less important recruiting periods such as April and May, and that it would be necessary to wait until the summer peak for a definitive picture to emerge.

Well, we’re now up to July data, and the picture – in application terms at least – is coming into focus. July itself, the first of three key months, was 15 per cent down year-on-year.

If you look back to our previous coverage of these releases, there are a number of caveats with this data, the most important one being that this is applications, not conversions. But here’s what we have at this point:

	2022	2023	2024
January	31,100	26,900	25,500
February	9,600	5,200	3,700
March	6,200	7,800	4,800
April	9,100	9,500	9,600
May	14,100	16,900	15,500
June	31,500	38,900	28,200
July	85,000	81,900	69,500
August	144,200	147,100	-
September	76,600	83,500	-
October	11,300	10,400	-
November	24,700	14,800	-
December	46,200	30,600	-

Applications from main applicants in January to July 2024, at 156,800, are 16 per cent lower than January to July 2023. The calendar year comparison is relevant for a couple of reasons – first, it’s a good talking point that we can expect to pop up in the press over the coming days and weeks, and will feed into the discourse around school exam results and home student intakes. It also marks the point in which the PGT dependants ban was introduced, though this clearly had an impact all through autumn 2023.

Due to the peculiarities of the Home Office release schedule, we won’t get fuller data for July (nationality, accepted/rejected applications, level of study, etc) until the Q3 stats in November. Later this month we will get the full Q2 stats, and the monthly figures for the vital month of August will appear in early September. Universities will have their own institutional picture to work off already, but in terms of sector-level trends the data landscape has got a little messy, though having such timely monthly data (this is a trial publication series for 2024) shouldn’t be sniffed at.

It’s worth emphasising that we only have month-by-month figures back to the start of 2022, and if you are the government – and this still applies under Labour, you’d think – really the key comparisons are with five years ago, not with the boom years of 2022 and 2023. In the year ending March 2024, visa grants were still 66 per cent higher than the same period to March 2019. A moderate drop this year wreaks havoc with some providers’ finances, but does little to change the macro debate around international student numbers and their interplay with net migration stats.