Tuition fees explained

Tuition fees are going up next year

The government has announced that uni tuition fees in England are going up by £285 next year, to £9,535.

That’s not necessarily as huge a change as it sounds, Here’s why:

This won’t have any impact on the amount you repay each month after graduating.

This will be 9% of anything you earn over £25,000 a year, which is exactly the same as it is now, and doesn’t change based on how much you owe.

Note: that £25,000 figure is if you’re from England. If you’re from Scotland it’s £31,395, from Wales it’s £27,295 and if you’re from Northern Ireland it’s £24,990.

Your debt will be written off 40 years after you start paying.

The government’s own stats suggest that roughly half of students won’t repay in full before then. So, there’s a good chance you’ll be making those monthly repayments every month for 40 years no matter how high tuition fees are.

It’s only if you earn enough to actually pay off your loan early that the fee increase will affect you – as you’ll have to make those monthly payments for longer to pay off the loan.

The new higher fees will still be covered in full and upfront by a Tuition Fee Loan from the government.

So there’s no need for you to pay for any of it until you graduate and start repaying your loan.

At the same time, the amount of money students can access to support their living costs has also gone up by 3.1%

Tuition fees: how much will I pay every month?

It might sound complicated, but it’s pretty simple once you know what you’re doing.

Under the current system, once you earn more than £25k a year, you pay back 9% of whatever you earn over that amount – and that’s staying the same even with tuition fees increasing.

Note: that £25,000 is if you’re from England. If you’re from Scotland it’s £31,395, from Wales it’s £27,295 and if you’re from Northern Ireland it’s £24,990. But we’ll be using the English example here as it’s a nice round number.

If you want to work out how much you might repay every month (once you’ve graduated and earn £25k+):

First pick a salary over £25k and then subtract £25,000 from it to work out how much you’re over the threshold. So, if you earn £35,000 a year, that’s a £10,000 difference.

Then grab a calculator and multiply that by 0.09 to work out what 9% of that is, which will be how much you pay each year. Sticking with the same example, 9% of £10,000 is £900 a year.

Because Student Loan repayments are usually done monthly, divide the yearly amount by 12 to figure out how much you’ll repay every month. So again, same example, if we divide £900 by 12, you’ll see it works out to £75 a month.

You can apply the same logic to any salary. So if you earn £30,000, you pay £37.50 a month and you’re left with £2,462.50 a month before paying any other taxes. If you earn £40,000 you pay £112.50 a month and you’re left with £3,220.83 before tax… and so on.

Crucially, the tuition fee rise won’t change that. That’s still how much you’ll end up paying and that’s still how much you’ll be left with, before tax.

Download the tuition fee explainer slide