How do refugee crises end? A naïve theory of return would suggest that refugee crises end when conflicts end. It is clear, however, that this theory is insufficient. Past refugee crises show that many refugees return before conflict termination, by any reasonable definition of the term, and that many refugees choose not to return even after conflict ends. Conflicts often do not end definitively on a national level; war ends in different ways across different areas and for different groups of people. To better understand how refugee crises end, this paper asks: How do refugees make choices about whether to return home or continue living abroad? We argue that it is essential to examine how individual refugees choose between returning home or not, as these choices profoundly impact the dynamics of hosting communities and the post-war political environment. Therefore, we explore the drivers of refugees’ decision-making, and how policy and programming might influence return dynamics. Using observational data on migration, and results from a conjoint experiment embedded in the survey, funded and scheduled for data collection in 2019, the authors how refugees’ return intentions and choices are shaped by four key dimensions: 1) their living situation in their host community in Lebanon; 2) the conditions in their place of origin inside Syria; 3) their access to information about the situation in Syria; and 4) the costs of mobility. Based on results from the survey that will field in March 2019, we will explore how conditions on the ground affect both the scale and composition of returns. A representative survey of Syrian refugees in Lebanon allows us to compare how conditions in Syria and in Lebanon interact with people’s characteristics to shape their intentions to return. This serves to explore the interaction of security and service access in Syria, with people’s personal experiences with the revolution and civil war, and the low quality of life in exile, to study which factors correlate with return intentions.