This week
Around 30% of a year's study visa applications are made in August, and on Thursday 10 September the Home Office published the count for August 2026. 99,500 sponsored study visa applications came in from main applicants, the first August under 100,000 since the monthly series began in January 2022, and 20,800 fewer than in August 2025 (source). Put the three summer months together and the fall is 18%, bigger than the summer after the dependants ban. The Spotlight takes the number apart and gives a first answer to the question we set ourselves in July, correction or collapse.
The same day brought two more sets of figures. UCAS closed its Clearing data for the year with the Day 28 file, and Enroly's September intake figures were reported by The PIE News. Enroly's figures cover the universities on its platform, not the whole sector. The two sets of figures do not agree on direction: UCAS undergraduate acceptances from outside the UK are up 3%, Enroly's CAS are down 27%. They agree that China carries more of the weight. Put together, they say the fall in the visa count is concentrated outside undergraduate study, in the postgraduate intake the UCAS file does not see. The other news in the week to 13 September was smaller, and none of it was good. University of Exeter staff voted 91% for industrial action over 500 jobs at risk (source), EC English told its 25 language schools to take no new arrivals over the weekend of 12 and 13 September, Canada raised the money a student has to show, Ireland lengthened the residence needed for citizenship, and the US ends duration of status on Tuesday 15 September.
The numbers
International acceptances through UCAS reached 66,610 on Day 28 of Clearing, 2,080 more than on the same day in 2025. China supplied 2,270 of them (source). These are undergraduate acceptances, so they say nothing yet about the postgraduate intake. Acceptances from every other country together fell by 190. On results day Issue 17 found that all of the growth was China and asked whether Clearing would spread it or concentrate it. It concentrated it. Between Day 15 and Day 28 the sector added 2,210 international acceptances, 1,600 of them from China. China's share of international acceptances was 25.8% on results day, 28.7% on Day 15 and 30.2% on Day 28; on the same day in 2017 it was 10.7%. Wonkhe's David Kernohan puts 70.3% of Day 28 international acceptances at high tariff providers and 9.25% at lower tariff providers (source).
Day 28, 2025 | Day 28, 2026 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
China | 17,840 | 20,110 | +2,270 |
India | 4,390 | 4,480 | +90 |
Ireland | 2,840 | 2,990 | +150 |
Hong Kong | 2,970 | 2,790 | −180 |
United States | 2,460 | 2,460 | 0 |
Malaysia | 2,370 | 2,200 | −170 |
UAE | 1,920 | 2,030 | +110 |
Turkey | 1,720 | 1,930 | +210 |
Nigeria | 1,100 | 1,070 | −30 |
All international | 64,530 | 66,610 | +2,080 |
CAS issued for September 2026 are down 26.9% on September 2025, and visa refusals are up 30% (source). Enroly's September figures, reported by The PIE News on Thursday 10 September, put acceptances 22% down and the final intake about 28% down, the same projection as in July. In July, as Issue 11 reported, Enroly's refusals were down 58%; by September they are up 30%. Some of that rise will be decisions catching up with applications, which had barely started in July, so our July reading that universities were screening harder is not the only explanation. In figures shared with Admit, Nigerian refusals are almost three and a half times what they were in September 2025. The table puts Enroly's September intake refusal rates next to the Home Office rates for April to June on the adult Student route. They are not the same measure: different sponsors, a different quarter, and Enroly has not said what its rate is measured against. Enroly's are lower in every market it gives. Ghana is highest on both; below that the order differs. By subject, business and management CAS are down 45.7%. Takeaway: refusal rate times share of your CAS is the number to watch. Ghana's rate is highest, but on 262 Home Office decisions in the quarter it can only hurt the few sponsors for whom it is a big market. Nigeria, at 25% on nearly 3,000 decisions, is the market most likely to carry a university over 5%.
Enroly CAS issued, change | Enroly refusal rate | Home Office refusal rate, Apr to Jun | |
|---|---|---|---|
Pakistan | −57.9% | 10.15% | 34.2% |
Nigeria | −37.8% | 11.9% | 25.0% |
Ghana | −36.4% | 30.95% | 43.1% |
Sri Lanka | −36.3% | not given | 18.2% |
Bangladesh | −30.2% | 9.1% | 26.5% |
India | −24.9% | 1.86% | 9.1% |
China | +6.6% | not given | 0.0% |
United States | +18% | not given | 0.2% |
Nepal | +24.4% | not given | 7.5% |
All markets | −26.9% | count up 30% | 7.6% |
EC English, a chain of 25 language schools, stopped accepting new student arrivals worldwide for the weekend of 12 and 13 September (source). The company's message to agents blamed "unforeseen operational circumstances". EC's student weeks fell 23% in 2025 and student numbers 10%; it closed its Bristol school in June 2026 and is closing Montreal at the end of September (source). By Sunday 13 September EC had made no further statement. FELTOM, the federation of Maltese language schools, said on 11 September that discussions with EC and the ELT Council, Malta's regulator, were ongoing (source). Takeaway: EC's students are mostly visitors on short courses, so its troubles are not in the Home Office count. The lesson is about partner finances. If you rely on a pathway or pre-sessional partner for students, it is worth asking whether their finances are strong enough to see them through to the January intake.
Policy watch
The court had not ruled on the US duration of status rule by Monday 14 September, so it takes effect on Tuesday 15 September as planned (source). NAFSA and a coalition of universities sued in August, and Judge Saylor heard their application for an injunction in Boston on Thursday 3 September. At the hearing he said he was "struggling to see a rational connection" between the rule and national security, and raised the possibility of a short temporary order to give himself more time (source). Under the rule published on 17 July, a new international student is admitted for a fixed period tied to the course rather than for as long as they remain enrolled (source).
Canada requires a single study permit applicant outside Quebec to show CAD 23,448 (about £12,500), up from CAD 22,895 (about £12,200), for applications from 1 September (source). The rise is CAD 553, or 2.4%. In Quebec the figure is CAD 24,617 (about £13,100). A review of June 2026 decisions by ApplyBoard found that financial documentation was the reason given in 47% of refusals (source). The UK's own maintenance requirement rises on 30 November (source).
Ireland will raise the residence needed for citizenship from five years to eight, with a language test and a civics test (source). The Cabinet approved priority drafting of the bill on Wednesday 9 September. The language test can be taken in English, Irish or Irish Sign Language. Ireland had a record 44,500 international students in 2024/25, 20.6% of them from India, and the route from study to settlement is part of what Ireland sells to them (source).
The signal
Nottingham City Council's survey of purpose-built student schemes found 3,541 empty beds for 2025/26 among those that replied, a vacancy rate of 12.7% and 16.1% in studios, in a city that had been running near full (source). The council's explanation is the January 2024 dependants rule, which removed the postgraduate students the studios were priced for. Cushman and Wakefield's 2025 report points at price as well: 17.0% of all student beds, and 24.4% of private ones, are above the maximum maintenance loan, from 3.7% in 2016/17 (source). Unite Group said in its interim results on 28 July that it has identified 15,000 to 20,000 beds for sale and will shrink from 29 cities to around 20; the beds it is selling are expected to run at 86% occupancy, where the group as a whole runs in the mid nineties (source).
Wonkhe's Jim Dickinson put those three together on Saturday 12 September. "A city can have thousands of empty beds and no affordable ones at the same time", because the empty rooms "are studios and premium en-suites priced for international postgraduates who stopped coming after the dependants ban" (source). He proposes a condition of registration that would make a provider publish the recruitment numbers it has given the council, the regulator and its applicants. Whether the summer's 18% fall reaches the studios depends on who is missing. If it is South Asian and West African postgraduates, the effect is in shared houses and family lets as much as in premium rooms; Chinese demand, which fills studios, is up on both counts in this issue. A university's recruitment forecast is also a landlord's forecast, and in some cities the council's. Each year the forecast is wrong, the case for publishing it gets stronger.
Spotlight · Sector · Correction, not collapse
August came in 17% down, the third month in a row between 17% and 20%. The collapse we set out as one possible outcome in July now needs the autumn to fall by almost half, and nothing in the summer points that way. What remains is still the largest summer fall the monthly series has seen, larger than the summer after the dependants ban.
The Home Office counted 99,500 sponsored study visa applications from main applicants in August 2026 (source). The August figures for the four previous years were 144,200, 147,200, 122,100 and 120,300, so 2026 is 20,800 below 2025, a fall of 17.3%. Dependants add little. 1,800 applied in August, 4,000 a year earlier and 25,100 in August 2023, before the ban.
August is the month that decides a September intake. In each of the last four years it carried between 28% and 31% of the calendar year's applications, and June to September together carried about seven in ten. June, July and August 2026 came to 181,500 applications, from 222,000 in 2025, a fall of 18.2%. In 2024, the first summer after the dependants ban, the same three months fell 16.2% and August fell 17.1%. Wonkhe called the 2026 fall "comparable with that caused by the dependants ban" (source). On the table it is slightly larger. The 2024 fall had one cause a planner could name: the ban removed the main applicants who would have brought dependants, and 22,600 fewer dependants applied that August. Behind the 2026 fall are several smaller changes, the refusal threshold, the shorter Graduate route, the levy announcement and the competition, and no single one to point to.
January to August 2026 totals 231,600 applications. Issue 12 set the test on 14 July, when only the first half had been published. If the rest of 2026 fell at the first half's rate of 30%, the year would end at about 299,000 applications, from 427,600 in 2025; if it fell at June's rate of 19%, about 336,000. July then came in 19.7% down and August 17.3%. On the summer's rate the year ends near 337,000, the better of the two outcomes almost exactly, about 21% down on 2025 and roughly 90,000 fewer applications. That is not settled. September is the largest month still to come, and Enroly's CAS figure suggests some of its fall has not yet reached the application count. The worse outcome, 30% down for the year, would now need September to December to fall by almost half, and the summer gives no sign of that.
August did not bring the spring back, or if it did, it was hidden. Issue 11 raised the possibility on 7 July that part of the spring's shortfall was students held for extra checks who would apply late, and said August would tell us whether it was. April and May were short by about 13,500 applications; the summer was short by 40,500. Had every one of the spring's missing applicants applied in the summer, the summer would still be down more than 10%. So either the spring's applicants are gone, or they came and the underlying summer fall is worse than 18%. Neither reading is comfortable, and the table cannot separate them. What it does show is that June, July and August fell 18.6%, 19.7% and 17.3%, three months inside a range of 2.4 percentage points, and that the spring's 40% was the worst of it.
Enroly's count and the Home Office's are further apart than they were in July. In July Enroly's CAS figure for September and the Home Office's first-half application figure both read 30% down, which was two different measures that happened to match. For the summer they read 26.9% and 18.2%. At least four things could explain the gap. Enroly's universities may have a heavier South Asian and West African mix than the sector. Its group of universities may not be the same as in 2025. Universities issuing CAS more carefully would send more of each CAS on to an application. And some September CAS holders may apply later than they did in 2025, which would put part of the fall into the September table. The first three would leave the gap in place; only the last would close it.
The monthly table counts main applicants on every sponsored study route, including children at schools, and rounds each figure to the nearest 100. The Home Office calls it provisional and revises it, upward more often than down: the year to August 2025 was 427,100 when first published and is 427,900 now, so 99,500 may not stay under 100,000 after revision. A fall of about a fifth will still be there. The Home Office's own headline figure, 16% down, is the rolling year to August, and over a third of that is September to December 2025, which was level with the year before. The table is also a different count from the quarterly dataset Issue 19 used for refusal rates, which covers adult students only, so the two sets of figures should not be mixed.
An application is also not a visa. The sector's refusal rate on the adult Student route was 4.6% over the year to June and 7.6% in April to June alone (source), and Enroly's September figures put refusals up 30%. The 5% test is applied to each sponsor's own applications, not to the sector, so the sector figure shows which way things are moving, not whether you pass. Either way the gap between applications and arrivals will be wider in 2026 than in 2025.
Things to think about this week
Which of the three figures is your September forecast built on, the 16% rolling year you will hear in meetings, or the 18% summer that becomes your enrolment count?
Do you know your own refusal count for Nigeria for the September 2026 intake? Enroly's rate is 12% and the Home Office's for April to June was 25%. If yours is anywhere near either, ask whether one market is enough on its own to carry you over the 5% line.
What happens to your recruitment plan if Chinese demand falls by a fifth, the fall the Home Office table shows for the summer as a whole? On Day 28 China supplied more than all of the sector's growth in undergraduate international acceptances.
Jobs · Who's hiring
The last word
The more positive outcome that Issue 12 allowed for on 14 July has arrived, and it is a summer 18% down, with the sector's quarterly refusal rate already past the 5% that each sponsor is tested against. That is what the better year looks like in 2026.
The next two Home Office releases, on 8 October and 26 November, will say how the year is remembered. Your own version of this issue is shorter. Put your September 2026 CAS count next to September 2025. Enroly's universities are 27% down; the Home Office's 18% is on a wider basis and is not the right comparison for a CAS figure. If you are well inside 27%, ask which markets did the work. If you are at 27% or beyond, the Home Office table cannot tell you why. Your own CAS data, market by market, can.
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