Search bar closed.
You'll be on the new-ish 'Plan 5' loan – the biggest change in student finance for a decade. It has increased the cost by more than 50% for many students. We take you through what you need to know.
Your student loan works differently:
Northern Irish? You'll have a 'Plan 1' student loan.
Scottish? You'll have a 'Plan 4' student loan.
Welsh? You'll have a 'Plan 2' student loan.
Our calculator shows how much the government expects parents to contribute to their child's student maintenance loan. In brief:
The size of the maintenance loan is based on household income.
It's assumed parents will fill any gaps, but this isn't made explicit.
The parental contribution varies depending on where you live.
Student accounts are simply bank accounts made for those in higher education. Yet banks love to reel in new students with goodies – be that with free 0% overdrafts, free railcards or free cash.
Our student bank accounts guide takes you through some student banking need-to-knows before giving a run down of the top student bank accounts for 2024/25.
There's LOTS to think about when going to university.
However, closely considering how you're going to make your money stretch and budgeting properly should be a TOP priority, particularly with student maintenance loans lagging behind inflation.
We've got our Student budgeting planner and Student moneysaving tips to help you get started. Then it's worth reading:
There are several different types of student loan in the UK – these are known as 'plans'. Knowing which of these student loan plans you're on is crucial as it affects how much interest you're charged, how high your repayments are, and when your loan gets wiped. Which system you're on depends on when you started uni, as well as where you're originally from (not where you go to study).
For more info, see Which student loan plan am I on?
The new 'Plan 5' loans for English undergraduates starting uni in 2023 and beyond could see many repaying far more over their working lives. So, some with savings are, understandably, considering avoiding the loans if they can. With normal lending, usually the idea is to borrow as little as possible and repay as quickly as possible, but student loans aren’t normal loans.
So this is a much more complex decision, and getting it wrong could cost you £10,000s. That's why Martin has dedicated a whole guide just to this question – see Martin Lewis: Should you pay for university upfront or take the new Plan 5 student loan?
Whether you should pay off your student loan if you've got spare cash is not a simple question to answer. It depends on whether you've other debts and when you studied, as that dictates your interest rate.
If you're an English or Welsh student who started university between 2012 and 2022, read Martin's 'Should I panic or pay it off?' guide. For everyone else, we talk you through it in our Student loan repayment guide.
Yes, you can. But how much you can borrow and the rules around when you repay it vary depending on where you're from in the UK. For more info, see our Postgraduate student loans guide.
