Editorial Policy

What this site is

Independent site. Not affiliated with the Student Loans Company, GOV.UK or any government body. We build free calculators and plain-English guides for people with a UK student loan or applying for one. Nothing here is financial advice, and our calculators cannot see your loan account; see the disclaimer. The site is run by Student Loan Calculator UK, the operator named in our privacy policy. You can reach us at info@studentloancalculator.uk.

Where our figures come from

• Thresholds, rates, write-off periods and fee caps are taken from GOV.UK, the Student Loans Company, HMRC and the devolved student finance bodies, and entered once in a single constants file that every calculator and page reads.
• The sources are listed by topic on sources we use. Key figures on our busiest pages also carry a [source] link to the exact page.
• If a figure cannot be traced to a primary source, we leave it out or label it as an assumption. The formulas and assumptions are on the methodology page.

How pages are updated and dated

• The "last updated" date on a page comes from the edit history of the files behind that page. It is not a site-wide stamp and it is not set to the day the site was built. The dates in our XML sitemap come from the same record.
• The figures used across the site (thresholds, rates, write-off periods, maintenance amounts) are held in one constants file in the site code, so one number cannot differ from page to page. When a figure is changed there, every page that uses it changes with it. The methodology page explains what the calculators assume.
• The footer's "Data last updated" date is the most recent real content change on a page that carries figures. Edits to policy and legal pages do not move it.

How we fix mistakes

We correct errors in the page and record each one, with the date, what it said before, what it says now and the source checked, on corrections and updates. Earlier feature and fix history is on the change log.

The October 2026 audit

In October 2026 we audited the site's figures, calculators, structure and trust pages. What it found and what we did:

• We rebuilt the calculators' maths independently from the GOV.UK rules and compared it with ours on about 75 cases and 189 individual checks (pay-period deductions, annual Self Assessment liability, combined loans, repayment and write-off dates, lifetime projections). There were no mismatches under the same assumptions.
• We checked the claims on the busiest pages against primary sources and corrected the ones that were wrong: redundancy pay, dividends, National Insurance rates, the Plan 2 write-off period, overseas thresholds, a payslip example and more. Each is on the corrections page with its source.
• We removed pages whose key claims we could not verify, and 84 pages that duplicated another page or sat outside the student loan topic: 66 now redirect to the page that covers the topic and 18 return "page not found".
• Assumptions that were not disclosed are now stated on the methodology page, including the difference between the 2% threshold uprating and the 3% RPI assumption.

Independence, advertising and links

• The site shows Google AdSense advertising; our publisher ID is published in the site's ads.txt file. Ads load according to your cookie choices, as described in the cookie policy.
• The site code contains no affiliate-programme links and no affiliate tracking parameters (checked 6 October 2026), and, since the last three were removed on 6 October 2026, no paid outbound links. Any outbound link placed for a commercial reason in future will be marked rel="sponsored" so it passes no ranking credit.
• On 6 September 2026 we removed or marked as sponsored 18 paid outbound links, as recorded on the change log.
• From January 2026 the site ran a guest-post and press-release section. Its pages were set to noindex and then removed on 5 October 2026, and the site no longer has a write-for-us page.

Report a problem

Email info@studentloancalculator.uk or use the contact page.