Three-quarters of asylum seekers who first received supports in 2022 were working two years later

In 2025, the daily expense allowance is a maximum of €38.80 a week for an adult, and €29.80 for a child. This is increased to over €100 a week if Ipas is unable to provide someone with accommodation. File picture: Sasko Lazarov /RollingNews.ie

More than three-quarters of asylum seekers who first began to receive supports in 2022 were working in some form two years later, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has said.

In a release on the data it has gathered around International Protection in Ireland, the CSO said the number of people benefiting from the “daily expense allowance” has increased considerably in recent years.

“We looked at the beneficiaries of the daily expense allowance, a social welfare benefit only available to International Protection applicants who live in, or are waiting to move into, accommodation provided by the International Protection Accommodation Service,” the CSO said.

In 2025, the daily expense allowance is a maximum of €38.80 a week for an adult, and €29.80 for a child. This is increased to over €100 a week if Ipas is unable to provide someone with accommodation.

The Department of Social Protection can check a person can continue to qualify for the allowance, because if a person earns over €125 a week, the payment is stopped.

The CSO pointed out while this was a “significant subset” of all asylum seeker applicants, not all applicants were in receipt of this allowance.

In 2022, the number of new allowance beneficiaries exceeded 10,000 for the first time, at 11,750 people.

This dropped to 10,252 new recipients in 2023, but rose again to 17,250 last year.

More men have consistently been in receipt of the allowance than women, with 2019 marking the highest share of women benefiting from the allowance, at 43% of the total number. In 2022 and 2023, women accounted for 34% of recipients.

Breaking it down by countries, Nigeria, Jordan, Somalia, and Pakistan all had more than 1,000 new people benefiting from the daily expense allowance last year.

The CSO also said there had been a considerable increase in the number of beneficiaries from Nigeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

In terms of work, asylum seekers can apply for a permit to do so once they have been in Ireland for at least six months.

“For example, 77% of all new beneficiaries from 2022 showed employment activity in 2024,” it said.

“In terms of a gender breakdown, for all new beneficiaries from 2022, 83% of men and 65% of women had employment activity.

“For the purposes of this analysis, any employments of less than €500 per annum and employments where the duration was less than two weeks in the year were excluded.”