Census 2021 · England and Wales · 9.9 million people
When they arrived, and at what age
Almost everything in a lifetime fiscal figure is decided by one number: how old someone was when they got here. Someone who arrives at 25 has been educated at another country’s expense and starts paying tax immediately. Someone who arrives at 4 is schooled here first. The census records which of those actually happened, for every country of birth, and this page uses that instead of a chosen example.
The figure the country pages report is not the average one
Run the same lifetime model at every arrival age the census recorded, and weight it by how many people arrived at each, and the foreign-born present value at arrival comes to £4,985 a person. The same population evaluated at a single arrival age of 25 — the example the country pages use — comes to £85,913. The choice of example is worth £80,927 a person, which is larger than almost anything else in this model.
The reason is that 30.2% of the foreign-born arrived before their eighteenth birthday. They were schooled here, which is a cost of about £110,000 before any of them earns anything, and no plausible working life at British wages recovers all of it in present value at a 3.5% discount rate. Neither figure is more correct than the other. They answer different questions, and this is the one a national total is asking.
This is not a forecast of future arrivals. It is the arrival-age distribution of the people who were here in March 2021, which reflects decades of past migration policy. Applying it to a future cohort would assume the next arrivals resemble the last, and the whole point of the figure is that the distribution is what moves the answer.
The arrival ages behind that number
And when they came
What it does to each country
The gap between the two figures is not the same everywhere, because arrival ages are not. A country whose migration is overwhelmingly of working adults barely moves; one with a large share of family arrivals moves a great deal. Both columns use average costing and a 3.5% discount rate.
| Country of birth | People | Arrived under 18 | Mean arrival age | At arrival age 25 | Weighted by observed ages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| India | 920,363 | 24.7% | 24.4 | £195,164 | £112,055 |
| Poland | 743,082 | 17.6% | 24.8 | £62,684 | £8,505 |
| Pakistan | 623,553 | 30.9% | 22.6 | −£38,846 | −£95,862 |
| Romania | 538,842 | 15.3% | 26.8 | £41,504 | −£8,159 |
| Ireland | 324,668 | 42.0% | 19.0 | £169,582 | £69,624 |
| Italy | 276,668 | 35.6% | 20.7 | £117,547 | £23,753 |
| Bangladesh | 273,044 | 34.8% | 21.9 | −£110,940 | −£163,492 |
| Nigeria | 270,754 | 26.2% | 25.7 | £111,372 | £33,412 |
| Germany | 263,370 | 63.2% | 13.8 | £154,258 | −£27,206 |
| South Africa | 217,173 | 32.4% | 24.1 | £270,263 | £140,071 |
| United States | 203,280 | 39.1% | 21.4 | £300,825 | £145,100 |
| China | 182,380 | 17.6% | 24.9 | £37,778 | −£1,529 |
Covering 100.0% of the foreign-born population across all 163 countries, of which the twelve above are shown.
Arriving young costs more than arriving late saves
What this settles about the Dutch comparison, and what it does not
The method page records a large unexplained gap against the Dutch study, which reports −€65,000 averaged over all immigrants. Part of that gap was never a disagreement at all: the Dutch figure averages over the entry ages that actually occurred, and the British figures it was being set against were at a single arrival age of 25. On the same basis Britain is £4,985, not £85,913, so most of the apparent divergence was a difference of scope.
What remains is still real and still unresolved. This model assumes residence for life where the Dutch one allows remigration, which flatters every figure here; and the two populations differ, so part of any remaining gap is a difference between the countries rather than between the methods. The sign difference — Britain positive, the Netherlands negative — is not explained by arrival age alone, and should not be treated as settled.