MOZOM-analyse

From reception agency to billion-budget megasystem: the taxpayer bill behind asylum reception

COA, Tweede Kamer, Officiele bekendmakingen, Fedasil, Destatis, Bundestag en Franse Senaat Migration 1 augustus 2026 om 07:30

Type: Analyse Author: the editorial team Published: 1 augustus 2026 om 07:30 Report a correction

Realistic editorial image of temporary European reception units with administration, calculator and documents as an illustration of the public costs of asylum reception.

Source: COA, Tweede Kamer, Officiele bekendmakingen, Fedasil, Destatis, Bundestag en Franse Senaat
MOZOM headline: From reception agency to billion-budget megasystem: the taxpayer bill behind asylum reception
Original headline: COA, Fedasil, Germany and France show how asylum reception grows into a publicly funded billion-euro system
Author: the editorial team
Date: 1 augustus 2026 om 07:30
Subject: MOZOM examines official accounts, budget papers and statistics to show how asylum reception in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France has grown financially, and where the taxpayer bill lands.

Research Open HTML chart Interactive chart with COA growth, cost breakdown and European comparison figures; source links are listed below. Research Download CSV data Reusable table with MOZOM's calculation based on official sources. Research Download JSON data Structured dataset with amounts, indicators, notes and source URLs.

Summary of the original report

According to its own financial accountability report, COA grew from 851.6 million euros in income in 2021 to 3.712 billion euros in 2025. Average occupancy rose from 55,600 people in 2023 to 73,991 in 2025, while the number of residents at the end of 2025 was 79,137. Staffing rose from 6,845 workers at the end of 2023 to 8,697 at the end of 2025. Belgium has a comparable reception agency in Fedasil: its federal grant rose from 296.4 million euros in 2015 to 929.4 million euros in 2024. Germany has no single COA equivalent; reception and benefits run through the federal level, states and municipalities. German Asylbewerberleistungen alone cost 6.718 billion euros gross and 6.423 billion euros net in 2024. France is even more fragmented: the Senate puts 2025 asylum costs at at least 1.85 billion euros and says identifiable costs are around 2 billion euros, while some medical, social, school and policing costs are not fully included. The conclusion is not that reception organisations are profit companies. The conclusion is that asylum reception has become a large publicly funded system, with its own staff, sites, contracts, healthcare costs and emergency reception logic.

Own source research: public budgets beside occupancy and staffing

MOZOM placed figures from the COA accounts, parliamentary papers, Fedasil budgets, German Destatis tables and French Senate reports side by side. The related HTML chart, CSV data and JSON data are available as clickable research links with this article and in the source list. The table is deliberately not a simple ranking, because the countries book costs differently. The Netherlands and Belgium have recognisable agencies. Germany books a large part through Asylbewerberleistungen and through states and municipalities. France divides costs across budget programmes, operators and emergency housing. The added value is the separation: organisation budget, benefit costs, reception capacity, staffing and footnotes are placed next to each other, not thrown into one pile.

From crisis to fixed capacity

The sharp point is not the word reception, but the move from emergency to structure. In the Netherlands, the COA budget rose from less than 1 billion euros in 2021 to more than 3.7 billion euros in 2025. The organisation runs with thousands of workers, hundreds of locations and large material costs. In 2025, material costs alone were 2.317 billion euros; personnel and overhead were 860.1 million euros; healthcare was 357.9 million euros. These are not abstract figures. They are collective funds that cannot be spent on other public goals at the same time.

Why lower inflow does not immediately mean lower costs

Asylum reception is a stock problem, not only an inflow problem. If procedures take long, if municipalities cannot house status holders and if family reunification arrivals end up in reception anyway, occupancy remains high. Costs therefore do not automatically fall when the number of new applications falls. Fedasil shows the same mechanism: fewer applications in 2025, but a network that was still almost full. France reports a reception rate around 72 percent, while housing remains the heaviest cost layer. The social question then becomes: how much temporary emergency logic may become permanent before taxpayers are entitled to a hard review?

Possible message behind the news

The official message is: reception grows because the chain is under pressure and needs more stable financing. The critical counter-reading is: stable financing can also normalise the crisis if procedures, returns, housing and inflow are not solved at the same time. The hard shared fact remains the bill: citizens pay through collective budgets.

Neutral conclusion

The hard conclusion is less spectacular than the word asylum industry, but more important. Based on the public accounts, COA is not a proven profit company. Fedasil, BAMF, OFII and French or German operators cannot simply be put in that box either. But asylum reception has become a megasystem with a billion-euro budget, carried by tax and contribution money. Speaking about that does not require proving a hidden plot. The visible documents are already heavy enough: the reception bill grows, the chain is blocked and the citizen pays.