About the Calculator
The UK Student Loan system is complicated.
The UK student loan debt you accumulate isn't debt in the traditional sense; you are only required to make repayments when you earn above a salary threshold. And, if you haven't fully repaid your debt 30 years after graduating from University, the remaining balance is written off. If you are on a Plan 1 loan, the debt is written off after 25 years.
In practice, this means that only a small percentage of current and future students are set to fully repay their student loan balance before it is written off. If you fall into this category, making overpayments to pay off your student loan early could cost you, because you are due to have your balance written off in the future (at no cost to you).
However, if you are a student who took out a small amount of student loan debt, or those who are high earners, there is a chance you may still fully repay your student loan balance before the balance is written off. For these few, overpaying may be a good option.
To help inform people about whether overpayments could be a good idea, I built www.studentcalc.co.uk, which will help you better understand the options you have and whether or not overpaying could be a good idea.
You can use the comparison feature to compare scenarios (such as overpaying on your loan or taking out more student loan debt), to see if it is likely to increase or decrease your repayments over time.
About the Calculator Inputs
- Choose the calender year in which you started (or will start) your course.
- If you don't yet know which year you will start, choose the earliest possible year - this should still give you an idea of costs.
- This is the average cost of your Maintenance Loan per year at University.
- The maximum maintenance loan you can apply for depends on your household income.
- This is the salary you will earn in the year following graduation.
- We make assumptions about how your salary will grow over time - you can view and adjust this rate in the advanced assumptions tab.
- You can manually set salary by individual year in the data table within the results tab.
- The Retail Price Index (RPI) is one of the two main measures of UK inflation produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
- Under Plan 2 (2012 and later) Student Loans, the interest rate depends on the RPI.
- During your course, the interest rate is RPI + 3%.
- After graduating, the interest rate is set to between RPI and RPI + 3%, depending on how much you earn.
- We assume an average RPI rate to simplify the calculations.
- If you earn more than this threshold pre-tax each year, then you start making student loan repayments.
- If you earn less than this threshold pre-tax each year then you make no student finance repayments that year.
- Your student loan repayment each year is 9% of your pre-tax earnings above the threshold.
- We assume this increases in line with average UK earnings growth.
- If you earn above the interest rate ceiling, then the interest on your student loan is set at RPI + 3%.
- If you earn below the interest rate ceiling, then the interest on your student loan is tapered, down to RPI at the current payment threshold.
- We assume this increases in line with average UK earnings growth.
- If you tick use historical data, we will use actual RPI and payment thresholds from the past.
- For example, in 2016 the payment threshold was £21,000 and RPI was 1.6%. We can use these actual figures rather than using our assumed RPI.
- Even if you tick use historical data, we will still use the assumptions about RPI and payment thresholds for years in the future.
- If you tick set loan size, you will be able to enter your outstanding loan total.
- This setting is useful if you already know how much student loan debt you have and if you have already made payments in the past.
- If you are still at University, do not use this setting.
- If you tick set tuition & maintenance by year, you will be able to enter individual tuition fee loan and maintenance loan payments by year within your course.
- This setting is useful if the tuition fee loan or maintenance loan total differed in particular years in your course.
- This setting cannot be used with the manually set loan size setting.
- If you tick increase starting salary with inflation, we will adjust your starting salary to reflect inflation.
- For example, if you start working in 2024, the nominal starting salary of your job will be higher than what you might expect because you likely haven't taken inflation into account.
- This setting cannot be used in conjunction with manually setting current loan balance.
- This setting will not affect calculations where the graduation date is in the past as we assume you set the actual nominal salary.
- Enter your current total student loan debt. You can find this figure on the UK Government's student loan repayment website.
- Do not use this setting if you are still at University - instead, click the button above named 'I don't know my balance.' This setting will work out what your student loan balance total will look like once you have completed University.
- If you choose, you can see what happens if you made extra monthly repayments on top of your standard repayments.
- We assume that the overpayments begin after graduating University.
- We assume that you increase the overpayment amount annually in line with inflation.
- Pick your student loan plan from the list of options.
- If you have studied at undergraduate level in England or Wales after 2012 to 2022, your loan will be Plan 2.
- If you have studied at undergraduate level in England or Wales from and after 2023, your loan will be Plan 5.
- If you have studied at undergraduate level in England or Wales pre-2012, your loan will be Plan 1.
- If you have studied at undergraduate level in Scotland, your loan will be Plan 4.
- If you have studied at postgraduate level after 2016, your loan will be the postgraduate loan option.
Support this project
This calculator is built and maintained by a solo developer and offered completely free. If you find it useful, consider supporting the project or sharing your feedback to help improve it.