A £5,000 bill can’t stop people from trying to become British

The most expensive citizenship costs in Europe are not putting people off: nearly a quarter of a million new Brits were naturalized in the year to June, the highest number since 2010. Becoming British remains an attractive proposition despite the extraordinary price.

First, one must secure a permanent residency permit known as “indefinite leave to remain,” costing £1,839 ($2,499). Full citizenship, including a mandatory ceremony, takes the total price to £5,065, without counting additional costs around visas, health fees and other administrative hurdles.

In many other European countries, the equivalent fee is only a few hundred euros.


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For Zilun Lin, a former University of Oxford student, the comparison comes as a surprise. “Wow, no way!” he says, during a phone interview. “That feels, I mean, it’s gutting.” A Portuguese national originally from China, Lin already enjoyed settled status in the UK but wanted to go further. “I do feel an inkling of identifying myself as more and more British,” says Lin, 25. “I genuinely quite like the UK.”

The decision was more a question of principle than personal finances. “I didn’t think that far ahead,” he says, referring to the cost. “It was more a case of ‘sticker shock’ when I found out about it later down the line.”

Despite earning a good salary as a data scientist, he adds: “For someone like me, it’s probably not good value.”

The story behind Britain’s exceptional costs started in 2004 when Tony Blair’s Labour government decided that the Home Office should be allowed to set visa, residency and naturalization fees higher than the administrative cost of processing them.

Then, in 2007, Labour went a step further by permitting the Home Office to ramp up fees in certain areas, like nationality applications, in order to cover the cost of processing other migration-related services. The subsequent Conservative-led coalition government then explicitly allowed the fees to be used to fund operations ranging from border security to drug-smuggling enforcement in 2014.

After each new piece of legislation, the costs rose.

“We are an outlier and the reason for that is the costs charged are intended to cover the cost of running the immigration service,” says Catherine Barnard, a professor of European law at Cambridge University. “No other country does that.”

In many circumstances, the costs can escalate even further. Another person, who did not wish to be named discussing personal matters, told Bloomberg she has been trying to secure citizenship for her parents who moved from Sri Lanka more than 20 years ago. When the combined naturalization fees exceeded £6,000, she used savings built up while working at a supermarket to help them.

The costs soared when the Home Office said they had applied through the wrong route and required them to pay for a new application before refunding the first. At one point before the refund, she says, she was around £14,000 out of pocket.

“If you do the sums and calculate how much it is for a visa for, for example, a visa holder, their spouse and two children, and add the costs for the NHS surcharge, and the training levy, it comes in at tens of thousands,” says Cambridge professor Barnard.

“I always thought this would be a tremendous disincentive for anyone to come but the data shows otherwise; people are finding the money some way.”

Migrants are typically attracted to the UK by English being the spoken language, existing family connections, the reputation for economic opportunity and strong education, among a range of other factors. Many people applying for citizenship have already lived in Britain for years, or even decades, yet sentiment toward non-citizens appears to have soured; Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has recently proposed a social housing system in which UK-born citizens are prioritized, and restrictions on voting rights.

Under pressure from Reform in the polls, the Labour government has been keen to tighten the rules around migration, levels of which have fallen sharply since it was elected in 2024. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood wants to extend the time in which someone must have lived in the UK before being granted indefinite leave to remain. While the policy has been criticized by MPs in the left-leaning Labour party, a strict approach to migration and citizenship remains popular with much of the electorate.

“Fees have gone up quite a lot in the past few decades, but there is still demand for visas, which stays pretty inelastic,” says Ben Brindle, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory, University of Oxford. “There will be a point at which it would deter people in a meaningful way. We just don’t know where that point is.”

Given the political context, it seems extremely unlikely that the UK’s high costs of citizenship will be eased any time soon. On the contrary, the gap could be narrowed if peer governments copy the policy.

“Other countries are eyeing up the UK model,” warns Barnard.