Early Payoff Date Calculator
How much longer you have to pay off a student loan depends on your plan's write-off date, not your balance: 25 years on Plan 1, 30 on Plan 2, Plan 4 and Postgraduate, 40 on Plan 5, all counted from the first April after your course. Overpaying only shortens that if you would have cleared the balance anyway.
This early repayment calculator works out how much extra you need to pay each month to clear your student loan by a target date, and what that saves in interest. Pick a date, and it returns the monthly overpayment required and the total cost either way.
There is no penalty for making extra student loan repayments[source]. Before setting a target date, it is worth checking should I overpay my student loan since paying it off early only saves money if you were on track to clear it before write-off anyway.
Pay Off Early?
Discover how much extra you need to pay each month to become debt-free by your chosen date.
Mandatory payment: £42/month
Threshold: £29,385 | Rate: 9.0%
Outcome: written off
Your loan is written off anyway
On £35,000 you never clear this balance: £156,455 is cancelled after 30 years, with or without an overpayment.
Every pound you pay early here buys you nothing you were not already getting free. Overpaying only saves money if you were on track to clear the balance.
Early Payoff Plan
Extra needed each month
£432
on top of the mandatory £42
Total monthly payment
£474
for 120 months
Total extra over the period
£51,728
what you actually hand over on top
Interest saved
£114,835
nothing is saved on a loan that is written off
Standard payoff
Written off at 30 years
with mandatory payments only
Time saved
20.0 years
against a date the loan never reaches on its own
How this is worked out
(£35,000 − £29,385) × 9% ÷ 12 = £42.11
Your mandatory Plan 2 repayment, 2026-27 threshold. Everything above is voluntary.
How this is worked out
£42.11 + £431.52 a month for 120 months = £473.63
Your total monthly payment until Sep 2036. Over the whole period that comes to £56,781, not the monthly figure times the months: overpayments stop the month the balance clears and the last one is capped at whatever is left.
Rates, assumptions and sources
Every figure below is the 2026-27 published figure, read from this site's single source of truth at page-render time[source]. The 6% Plan 2 and Postgraduate interest cap covers the 2026/27 year only and is not assumed to continue[source].
| Plan | Threshold | Rate | Interest | Written off | Threshold freeze |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plan 2 | £29,385[source] | 9% | 4.1% to 7.1% by income, capped at 6% for 2026-27[source] | 30 years[source] | Frozen at £29,385 until April 2030 |
Write-off is counted from the April after the course ends, not from the course-end date itself, and the Plan 2 interest bands (£29,385 lower, £52,885 upper) are frozen alongside the Plan 2 repayment threshold.
This calculator also assumes
- Interest rate used
- 4.8% (your plan and salary today)
- Salary growth
- None — your salary is held flat
- Write-off horizon simulated
- 30 years
- Repayment threshold
- £29,385 (2026-27)
Growth, inflation and long-run interest figures are assumptions, not published rates. Change them and the projection changes.
Both scenarios are simulated over the same 30-year write-off horizon, so "interest saved" is a real saving and not an artefact of comparing two different time periods[source].
Paying off a student loan early: common questions
How much longer will it take to pay off my student loan?
For most UK borrowers the answer is the write-off date, because repayments are set by income rather than balance and stop when the term ends: 25 years for Plan 1, 30 for Plan 2, 30 for Plan 4, 30 for a Postgraduate Loan and 40 for Plan 5, counted from the first April after your course. If your salary is high enough to clear the balance sooner, enter it above and the calculator projects the actual payoff month.
Is there a penalty for paying off a student loan early?
No. Gov.uk confirms there is no penalty for making extra repayments, and you can clear the balance in full at any time direct to the Student Loans Company. Extra repayments cannot be refunded once made, so check first whether you would have cleared the loan before its write-off date; if not, the money mostly reduces the amount that would have been cancelled anyway.
Does overpaying reduce my monthly student loan deduction?
No. PAYE deductions are a fixed 9% of pay above your plan's threshold (6% on a Postgraduate Loan), whatever your balance, so overpaying leaves the payslip figure unchanged. What changes is the date the balance reaches zero and the interest added in the meantime.
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Related student loan calculators
The early repayment calculator answers one specific question. For the full picture, start with our UK student loan calculator on the homepage, work out what leaves your payslip each month with the monthly repayment calculator, or check what you can borrow with the student finance calculator. Every tool on the site is listed in the UK student loan calculator directory.
- student loan overpayment calculator: whether voluntary overpayments are worth making on your plan
- total loan cost calculator: everything you will repay over the life of the loan
- investment vs overpayment calculator: whether the same money does more in the market than against the loan