Student finance
How Student Finance Actually Works
If the thought of "student finance" makes your stomach tighten, you're not alone. For a lot of people thinking about going back into education — especially if you're a bit older, juggling a job, a mortgage or a family — the word "loan" brings up a very reasonable question: can I actually afford this? The good news is that student finance in the UK works quite differently from a normal loan, and once you understand the basic mechanics, it tends to feel a lot less frightening.
What you're actually being offered
There are two main parts to student finance in England, and it helps to keep them separate in your head. The first is the Tuition Fee Loan, which covers your course fees and is paid directly to your university — it never lands in your bank account. For 2026/27, full-time undergraduates can borrow up to £9,790 a year, and this isn't means-tested, so it doesn't depend on your income or your household's. The second is the Maintenance Loan, which is meant to help with living costs — rent, bills, books, travel — and is paid to you in instalments across the year. This one is means-tested, so the amount depends on your income (and, for younger students, household income). For 2026/27, the maximum is up to £14,135 a year if you're studying in London and living away from home, up to £10,830 if you're living away from home elsewhere, and up to £9,118 if you're staying with parents. If full-time study isn't realistic alongside work or caring responsibilities, part-time funding exists too — including a part-time Tuition Fee Loan of up to £7,145 for 2026/27 for study at a publicly funded university.
How and when you actually pay it back
This is usually where the anxiety lives, so it's worth being precise about it. Student loan repayments only start once you're earning above a set threshold, and even then, they're taken automatically through the tax system, in the same way as tax and National Insurance — you don't get a bill. For most people starting courses now (on what's called Plan 5), you repay 9% of whatever you earn above £25,000 a year. Earn below that, and you pay nothing at all. If your income drops — say you go part-time, take a career break, or hit a rough patch — your repayments drop with it, or stop. Interest is charged, but on Plan 5 loans it's capped at the Retail Prices Index rate (RPI), currently 3.2%, with no additional percentage on top. And whatever is left unpaid after 40 years is written off completely. It isn't a debt that follows you around indefinitely or affects things like mortgage applications in the way people sometimes assume.
You don't pay anything back until you're earning above the threshold — and if your income dips, your repayments dip with it.
If you're coming to this later in life
One of the most common worries we hear from career-changers and mature learners is a version of "surely this isn't for me." It is. There's no upper age limit on Tuition Fee Loans or Maintenance Loans, and age on its own is never a barrier to funding. The one specific exception is that if you're 60 or over at the start of your course, you can't get a Maintenance Loan (though the Tuition Fee Loan is still available). There's also a genuinely helpful quirk in the system for anyone over 25, or anyone who's been financially independent for a while: you're usually classed as an "independent student," which means your entitlement is based on your own income, not your parents'.
A few quick facts worth holding onto:
- The Tuition Fee Loan is paid straight to your university — you never handle that money yourself.
- Repayments only start once you earn over £25,000 a year, and are capped as a share of income above that line, not a fixed monthly amount.
- Mature students are assessed on their own (and any partner's) income, not their parents', from age 25 onwards.
- Part-time study intensity of at least 25% of a full-time course can still qualify you for both a Tuition Fee Loan and a Maintenance Loan.
Making sense of it for your situation
None of this is a substitute for working through your own numbers — everyone's circumstances, course choice and personal finances are different, and we'd never want to suggest otherwise. What tends to help most is simply talking it through with someone who can walk you through the application process and explain how it applies to your specific situation, rather than trying to piece it together from forum posts at midnight. That's exactly the kind of conversation we have with people every day at GradForward. Our guidance is free for students to use — we're paid by the universities we work with, not by you, so there's no cost or obligation on your end to get some clarity. We can't promise a place, a specific funding amount, or a particular outcome, but we can help you understand your options and what student finance would actually look like for you. If you've been putting off finding out because the system feels confusing, get in touch and get some free guidance — it might be more straightforward than you think.