Signs of recovery in student visa applications
James Coe is Associate Editor for research and innovation at Wonkhe, and a senior partner at Counterculture
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July’s visa application data shows signs of some stabilisation after an enormous drop off in applicants in the last academic year.
Typically, July is the second or third largest month for student visa applications. This July there have been 73,500 applications, in comparison to 69,500 in 2024, 81,900 in 2023, and 85,000 in 2022. By no means a full recovery from the ban on bringing dependents but a rosier picture than many may have feared.
In fact, there have been more student visa applications in six of the seven months between January 2025 and July 2025 compared to the same month in the previous year. This comes off the back of what was already a busy December for applications.
The Home Office release led with the fact that
applications from Sponsored study visa main applicants in the year ending July 2025 (428,900) were 3 per cent lower than the year ending July 2024.
This is true when comparing July 2023-24 and July 2024-25. However, if we compare January to July 2025 with January to July 2024 there has actually been a 13 per cent increase in applications rising from 156,800 to 177,800.
There is an excitable way of looking at the data and highlighting that dependent visa applications are up 40 per cent in July 2025 compared to July 2024. A more sober reading is that the number of applications are down by 12,000 compared to July 2022 and hovered around 2,800 in July 2025. The overall number of dependent visa applicants are down overall this calendar year compared to last.
It is then all eyes on August. It is still too early to arrive at concrete conclusions on what this means for international student recruitment. However, the data is trending toward a greater number of applications, and therefore a greater number of students, than the tone of some of the coverage back in October 2024 suggested.
Unfortunately, there is no further breakdown of who is applying to what or where. And some tentative optimism on visa applications will not stop providers trying to protect their financial position with domestic recruitment and it certainly will not offset the real losses providers have incurred because of the international students that have not enrolled.
The figures today are a positive signal but it is still early days in understanding the outlook for 2025-26 onwards.