The UNHCR said forced displacement of people due to conflict or persecution decreased in 2025 for the first time in a decade. But the agency warned in its annual report on Thursday that the number of 118 million people forced to flee their homes or countries is still a worrying number.
A look at the agency’s global trends report on refugees and displaced people, in numbers:
The total number of people forcibly displaced due to conflict, violence or persecution at the end of 2025 reached 117.8 million people. This number includes refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced people and other groups in need of international protection. It’s the first time in a decade that the statistic has declined. Tariq Abu Shabaka, chief statistician at the UN agency, said the reason behind this decline was the increase in the number of people returning to their homes and the fact that many refugees acquired citizenship of their host countries, among other reasons. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that the number of displaced people globally, most of them due to conflicts, is unacceptably high.
The proportion of children among 41.6 million refugees last year. While Colombia, Germany and Turkey each hosted more than two million refugees, the majority of them live in low- and middle-income countries. Despite a 3% decline from the previous year, 5.4 million people crossed international borders in 2025 in search of asylum.
Seven out of ten refugees live in exile for five years or more, often trapped in sprawling camps in poor countries. “Humanitarian aid saved lives,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Barham Salih said, adding that it was “never intended to support generations of people indefinitely.” The agency aims to halve the number of long-term refugees who rely on humanitarian aid by 2035.
Number of internally displaced people. The ongoing war in Sudan was behind the largest displacement in the world, with 9.1 million people forced to flee their homes. Colombia, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan also have large numbers of displaced people.
The outlook for 2026 doesn’t look much better. With the outbreak of the Iran War in February, 3.2 million people were displaced within Iran by March, and by mid-May, one million people were displaced within Lebanon. “This is truly unacceptable and we must make sure this does not become a new normal,” Saleh said.
Three countries – Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan – saw 90% of the 4.4 million refugees return to their homes in 2025. This was the second highest number since UNHCR began keeping records six decades ago. Another 10.3 million displaced people returned to their areas of origin last year. But Saleh warned that many of those who returned did so under pressure and without the basic infrastructure and conditions necessary for a decent life. “A voluntary return to post-conflict Syria and a return under pressure to Afghanistan are not the same thing,” Saleh said.
Number of stateless people, of which the Rohingya from Myanmar constitute the largest group. The majority of stateless people live in Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, Thailand and Myanmar. Only 46,000 will obtain citizenship in 2025.
The number of refugees resettled, which fell sharply from 188,000 in 2024. This represents a small fraction of those in need, Saleh said, as he urged governments to expand legal pathways to resettle refugees. Saleh said: “Every dangerous sea crossing and every death in the desert represents a failure of the international community.” “The human cost of failure is measured not in statistics but in lives.”