Transparency data

Estimated number of people who still need to create a UKVI account: methodology note

Updated 27 February 2025

This note explains the methodology used to estimate the number of people who need to register for a UKVI account.

1. It focusses on people who had permission to stay at the end of 2024 and is based on visa decision records from November 2008 when biometric residence permits (BRPs) were first issued.

2. The majority of people able to create an account are those with BRPs, but the data also includes those granted leave from November 2024, when we stopped issuing BRPs.

3. Successful visa applicants now get an eVisa, not a physical document. For certain immigration routes, successful applicants will still need to register for an account on applications granted during 2025.

4. This will continue until successful applicants to all immigration routes are provided with an account automatically at the point they are granted status.

5. People who have received an immigration decision since 1 January 2025, are not included in this estimate.

6. People with indefinite leave to remain (ILR) who use an ink stamp or vignette in a passport (also known as legacy documents) to prove their rights are being encouraged to create a UKVI account to access their eVisa by making a no time limit (NTL) application. The estimate includes people who have made an NTL application where they have not had an account created automatically.

7. The Home Office has a record of all UKVI account creations that have been completed and their date on GOV.UK. Some of these have been created by visa holders who already had an account created for them as part of the visa application process. Others have been completed by visa holders with leave that has since expired.

8. By the end of 2024 there had been approximately 3.8 million account creations in total, including accounts created by visa holders who already had an account created for them as part of the visa application process and expired cases. We call this the ‘completed registrations’ list.

9. The Home Office holds records of visa applications, and their outcome with details such as when a decision was made on the application, the visa expiry date (if granted) and the immigration route.

10. Records are included in the estimate if they meet the following criteria:

• the data highlights valid immigration leave that is currently active
• the data relates to a relevant immigration route that was not issued with a customer account as part of the original application (for example, short stays are excluded as they do not need an account at present)
• where there is no evidence of subsequent naturalisation
• where the immigration status was issued before the end of 2024

11. At the end of 2024, this gives the total people needing to create a UKVI account, regardless of whether they have created an account or not, as approximately 4 million.

12. By matching the ‘completed registrations’ with people needing to create a UKVI account by the end of 2024, using Home Office identifiers, we can identify those who have not yet done so. By the end of 2024, approximately 3.2 million people had created an account leaving 0.8 million outstanding.

13. This number will decline over time because:

• people will continue to create accounts, and there were approximately 100,000 account creations from this cohort in January 2025
• immigration leave expires and these are removed from consideration on the assumption that either the migrant leaves the UK, or the migrant automatically acquires a customer account if he or she makes a new successful application for an immigration status - analysis has estimated that approximately 100,000 visas expired from this cohort during January 2025, the majority of which were student visas

14. At the end of January 2025, there are estimated to be approximately 600,000 remaining people who still need to create a UKVI account.  Most of these people are those whose BRP expired at the end of 2024.

15. This methodology will be updated on an ongoing basis to reduce the uncertainty in the estimates.

Figures used in this note are rounded to the nearest 100,000.