Eurostat extended its monthly asylum dataset to June on Monday morning, and the German line is the one that stands out: 4,265 first-time applicants, down 28.5% from May and 41.1% from a year earlier. Eurostat’s German series starts in January 2008, and no month since June 2012 has been lower. Read on its own it is a fourteen-year low, though not by much — May 2020 came in at 4,495, only 5.1% higher.
It should not be read on its own. The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum began to apply on 12 June 2026 under Article 79 of the Asylum Procedure Regulation, which makes June the first reference month in the series to straddle two legal regimes: eleven days under the old rules, nineteen under the new ones.
Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees publishes the split. Its June report records 4,267 first applications received in the month, "of which 812 first applications since the entry into force of the GEAS reform", and 1,311 asylum applications in total after the changeover once subsequent applications are included. The residual — 3,455 first applications over 1 to 11 June — implies 314 a day. The 812 over the following nineteen days implies 43.
The tell that this is a counting seam rather than a migration event is in the subsequent applications. The reform broadened what counts as one on 12 June: alongside national subsequent applications, transnational ones and cases where an applicant has a live procedure in another member state now fall into the category. A definition that got strictly wider recorded 499 applications in nineteen days, against an implied 1,040 in the preceding eleven — a fall of about 72% a day in a category that should mechanically have risen. BAMF states elsewhere in the same report that a June-to-May comparison is not possible because of the changed definitions, and describes the resulting movement as a purely statistical effect.
The rest of Europe moved much less. Across the thirteen member states that reported June, May, April and June 2025 to Eurostat, applications in June were 6.5% below May and 19% below June 2025. The month-on-month moves within that group run from a fall of 59.7% in the Netherlands to a rise of 28.6% in Denmark. Eurostat has published no EU-wide aggregate for either May or June; the most recent official EU27 monthly total remains April’s 43,410.
One further caution applies to the low itself. Eurostat’s German series does not simply mirror BAMF’s: in sixteen of the last eighteen months it has run between 3.5% and 8.6% above the German office’s first-application count, and June 2026 is one of only two months since January 2025 in which the two figures nearly coincide. On BAMF’s own basis June is 4,267, down 23.2% from May and 37.8% from a year earlier — still a sharp fall, but a different one. The first month in which the pact’s effect on application volumes can be read at all is July.