1. MoneySavingExpert
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  3. University Maintenance Ready Reckoner

How much should you save for your child to go to uni? calc

How much the government expects you to save towards your child's future student costs. Child already at uni? Use our Parental Contribution calc instead.

Need-to-knows

  • This is about your child's student living costs, NOT their tuition fees.
  • The parental contribution varies depending on where you, the parent(s), usually live.
  • For more info, read Martin's full parental contribution briefing.

Your details

About your household

Where do you live?

The amount of parental contribution needed will vary depending on where you, the parent(s), live.

About your child's course

Course length
Child already started their course?

Use our Parental Contribution calculator instead.

Your results

Summary

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Enter your details above to see your results here.

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We've calculated your annual parental contribution by subtracting the loan your child will receive after means-testing from the full loan available for someone on the lowest income.

PS: If you have feedback about this calculator, please let us know by emailing tools@moneysavingexpert.com or posting in our forum.

This is an estimate - we've made some assumptions...

Predicting future costs is never easy, yet unless the system changes radically, we hope this will be in the right ballpark. Though of course your own income and circumstances can change too. So see this more as help to understand the scales of magnitude of the money you'll need. The two most important things to understand are…

  • For simplicity, we've not included inflation.

    So all amounts are based in current money - rather than future prices. However, to balance that out, we also haven't included interest in the savings, which should mitigate some of the impact of inflation.

  • Student loan terms could change in future.

    For example, the minimum household-income band is likely to change, along with the maximum loans available, but as we don't know by how much (and we can't even predict it), we can't factor that in.

We hope that by providing this calculation, it at least gets you thinking about how to prepare your finances for this possible future cost.

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