In 2025, The Netherlands rejected more asylum requests than it accepted. Compared to the previous year, the rejection rate was 56 percent higher. The biggest factor behind these changes is probably the change in the status of Syrian applicants.
Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), which is the Dutch national statistics agency, shows that authorities in the Netherlands rejected more asylum applications than those it accepted throughout 2025.
In total numbers the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) rejected around 8,100 applications while accepting 7,400 in 2025; the majority of those applications notably were rejected in the second half of the year.
This marks a sharp rise in rejection numbers compared to 2024 of 56 percent.
Statistical data, however, also showed that despite ongoing efforts to speed up the processing of asylum requests in the Netherlands, IND officials managed to assess only around 5,600 asylum applications in total in 2025 compared to the previous year.
This marks a 27 percent shortfall of fully processed requests compared to 2024; according to the IND, over 50,000 people were still waiting for their asylum applications to be processed at the end of 2025.
Fewer people seek protection in the Netherlands
Meanwhile, however, a significantly smaller number of people applied for protection in the Netherlands in 2025 in the first place:
Only about 24,000 people applied for asylum for the first time in the Netherlands last year — a quarter less than was the case in 2024.
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Dutch authorities cutting down subsidiary protection numbers
Dutch authorities announced that they had also changed the allocation of various protection statuses for 2025, with 70 percent fewer asylum applications allocated to be processed on the basis of subsidiary protection compared to numbers for 2024.
In total numbers, fewer than 3,000 people were given subsidiary protection status in the Netherlands in 2025 in total — down from over 10,000 the previous year.
In the Netherlands, subsidiary protection is a form of protection which is typically granted to people who are not directly eligible for full refugee status but are nevertheless considered to be at serious risk if they were to return to their country of origin.
In various parts of Europe, this status was for many years particularly applicable to Syrian war refugees, with hundreds of thousands of Syrians escaping the civil war in their nation and going to various EU states in the course of the past decade.
However, with the official end of widespread hostilities in the beleaguered Middle Eastern nation in late 2024, the rate of issuing this status declined drastically, especially with a moratorium on Syrian asylum cases being enacted soon after the fall of the Assad regime.
Dutch authorities were only allowed to look at Syrian cases again as of June last year, issuing far more rejection letters than prior to Assad's fall.
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Many Syrians denied protection in the Netherlands
In fact, only 25 Syrians were given subsidiary protection in 2025 — a mere shadow of the rate of 7,200 successful cases just a year earlier.
The number of successful Syrian applicants was also incredibly low in other forms of protection, with only 30 Syrians being given full asylum status as refugees — a rate which in 2024 still stood at 2,900 successful cases.
In total, the IND made as little as 390 positive decisions on Syrian asylum applications across various levels of protection throughout the year; this reflects a total success rate of 28 percent of all applications submitted by Syrians.
Just a year earlier, nearly 11,000 positive asylum decisions across the various forms of protection had been approved in the Netherlands for Syrian nationals, with a total success rate of 95 percent.
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Greater focus on personal circumstances in asylum requests
Some of these developments go hand-in-hand with the Netherlands allocating about a third fewer asylum places in 2025 on the basis of full refugee status.
In absolute numbers, only about 3,400 people from all nationalities were given asylum status as refugees in the country last year, which is about 1,900 fewer cases compared to the previous year.
At the same time, however, this shortfall was somewhat equalized by more asylum applications being allocated to people applying on the basis of humanitarian protection.
This status is given to individuals in the Netherlands, who qualify for receiving protection due to facing distressing personal circumstances in their country of origin, which stop them from returning — such as women, who fled the prospect of being subjected to the practise of female genital mutilation (FGM).
In 2025, this included the case of four Afghan women who were due to be deported to their country after the IND had decided that they should adapt to life under the Taliban; ultimately however, they were given the right to remain in the Netherlands after all on account of their personal circumstances.
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