Refugee Returns by Country of Origin 2025

What this chart shows: how many refugees returned to their home country during 2025, by country of origin, as recorded by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

How the data is collected: UNHCR's methodology defines returnees as people who returned from abroad after seeking international protection, including repatriating refugees and repatriating asylum-seekers whose claims were rejected, back to their former country of habitual residence. The figures come from its end-2025 statistics, published in June 2026.

Background: UNHCR reports that nearly 4.4 million refugees returned home in 2025, and it links the 3% fall in the global number of refugees to a sharp increase in returns, mostly to Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan. It also warns that many returns took place under adverse circumstances. For Afghanistan, UNHCR says most returns were involuntary, caused by changes in host countries' policies, and that returnees face extremely limited infrastructure, resources and economic opportunities. For Syria, it reports around 1.3 million returns after the fall of the Assad government, into socio-economic conditions it describes as extremely fragile.

Limits: UNHCR's Global Trends report gives around 2.9 million Afghan returns in 2025, a wider figure than the 1.95 million returned refugees in its database; this chart uses the database figure so that all countries are counted the same way. Internally displaced people who went home are counted separately (10.3 million in 2025).