Refugees by Country of Origin 2025

What this chart shows: the countries that the largest numbers of refugees had fled from, as recorded by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, at the end of 2025. Each value adds together refugees under UNHCR's mandate (including people in refugee-like situations) and "other people in need of international protection", the grouping behind UNHCR's global refugee figure of 35.6 million.

How the data is collected: UNHCR compiles the number of people from each country of origin living in each country of asylum and publishes the end-year figures in its Refugee Data Finder and in the Global Trends report released in June 2026. UNHCR's methodology notes that the category "other people in need of international protection" was introduced in mid-2022 and that Venezuelans previously counted as "Venezuelans displaced abroad" are now included in it, retroactively back to 2018.

Background: UNHCR reports that seven in ten refugees and other people in need of international protection come from just six countries: Afghanistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. It says the number of refugees from Sudan grew by 35% during 2025 as the conflict entered its fourth year. Afghan refugees and other people in need of international protection fell by 36%, and UNHCR states that most Afghan returns were involuntary, driven by changes in host countries' policies. Around 1.3 million Syrians returned from abroad during 2025, following the fall of the Assad government.

Limits: the figures do not include the roughly 6 million Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA, a separate UN agency, which UNHCR reports alongside but outside these counts. Asylum-seekers still waiting for a decision (9 million at the end of 2025) and people displaced inside their own country are also counted separately. For Venezuela, 94% of the total is "other people in need of international protection" rather than formally recognised refugees.