Where Data Tells the Story
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Global forced displacement fell in 2025—but the reversal needs context. UNHCR estimates that 117.8 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2025, down from a record 123.2 million one year earlier. That is a decline of 5.4 million people, or 4.4%, after 13 consecutive annual increases in the published series. The reduction largely reflects increased returns by refugees and internally displaced people, particularly in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Syria. Yet UNHCR cautions that many returns occurred under adverse circumstances or to extremely fragile settings, where insecurity, weak services and limited livelihoods persist. The wider scale remains extraordinary: one in every 70 people on Earth is still forcibly displaced. At the end of 2025, the global total included 41.6 million refugees, 9 million asylum-seekers and 68.7 million people displaced within their own country due to conflict or violence, with UNHCR applying adjustments to avoid double counting. The chart uses the complete 1994–2025 annual universe in UNHCR’s current historical table. No years are excluded. Values are plotted in millions, the endpoint labels are rounded to one decimal place, and the percentage change is calculated from the published 2024 and 2025 totals.