“Department for Work and Pensions data shows the share of Universal Credit paid to foreign nationals rose to 15.5% in January 2026.”
Reform UK has corrected part of its welfare proposals plan published earlier this week. The Making Welfare Work plan claimed government data showed the share of Universal Credit paid to foreign nationals “rose to 15.5% in January 2026”.
This isn’t correct. 15.5% was the proportion of people on Universal Credit in January 2026 who are not British or Irish citizens, but this figure has been falling since 2024, not rising.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) publishes data showing the number of people on Universal Credit each month broken down by their immigration status. This data is available dating back to April 2022.
The latest figures when Reform announced its plan showed that in January 2026 approximately 1.3 million, or 15.5%, of the roughly 8.4 million people on Universal Credit did not have British or Irish citizenship or right of abode. This assumes a small number with unknown immigration status are foreign nationals, as it seems Reform did.
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This was actually the lowest proportion across the entire period for which these figures are available, and the percentage has been falling consistently since June 2024, when 17.5% of people on Universal Credit (UC) didn’t have British or Irish citizenship or right of abode.
Figures published on 18 August have revised the proportion in January 2026 down further to 15.2%.
These figures look at immigration status, not country of birth, so the figures for British and Irish citizens will include people who have become British citizens after moving here from abroad. They also probably overstate the number of foreign nationals to some extent, because the DWP itself notes that an unknown number of foreign claimants will have become British citizens without their benefit records being updated.
After we emailed Reform with questions about the 15.5% figure, the policy document changed to say the share “was 15.5%” instead of “rose to 15.5%”.
This is better but still not quite what this figure shows, as we’ll explain below.
What about the share of Universal Credit paid to foreign nationals?
So far we’ve only talked about the share of foreign UC claimants, which is the data that is published and what Reform confirmed its figures are based on, but that isn’t necessarily the same as “the share of Universal Credit paid”, as Reform phrased it.
The DWP told us it doesn’t publish the breakdown by expenditure, but information published last year in response to a Freedom of Information request showed the proportion of Universal Credit expenditure paid to households with at least one foreign national (a different measure again) was 16.5% in 2024, 16.3% in 2023 and 15.5% in 2022.
These figures are for households, so they include money being paid to families with British children or spouses of a non-British/Irish citizen, meaning they are not directly comparable with the DWP figures for the number of people on Universal Credit.
But none of these figures are lower than the 15.5% quoted by Reform, so they don’t suggest there was a rise leading up to January 2026.
