Students Are £467 a Month Short, Save the Student’s 2026 Survey Finds
The 14th National Student Money Survey puts average student spending at £1,146 a month and the gap left by the Maintenance Loan at £467. A record 77% of the 1,419 students who responded said they worry about repaying it.
Key Takeaways
- Save the Student published its 14th National Student Money Survey on 15 September 2026. It is based on 1,419 responses collected online between May and August 2026.
- Respondents spent an average of £1,146 a month (£1,326 in London), and the Maintenance Loan fell short of that by £467 a month, or £5,604 a year.
- 63% said they skip meals at least some of the time to save money, including 22% who do so often. 9% used a food bank during 2025/26.
- A record 77% worry about their Student Loan repayments, up from 63% in 2025 and the highest in the 11 years the question has been asked. Yet 70% did not know their own interest rate and 46% said they do not fully understand the terms of their loan.
- This is one organisation’s survey of people who chose to respond to it, not official statistics. It is a good measure of what struggling students report; it is not a random sample of the student population, and it carries no margin of error. We set out exactly what that means below.
In this article
What the Survey Found
Save the Student, the independent student money website that has run this survey every year since 2013, published the results of its National Student Money Survey 2026 on 15 September 2026. The report was written by Jake Butler, the site’s chief operating officer. It is the 14th edition, and it is the most detailed public picture available of how UK students are actually paying for their degrees right now.
The central finding is a gap. Students in the survey spent an average of £1,146 a month on living costs, while the Maintenance Loan covered an average of £467 a month less than that. Save the Student calls this its shortfall statistic, and it is the number the whole report turns on.
The headline numbers, as published
- Average monthly spending on living costs: £1,146, rising to £1,326 in London
- Average monthly shortfall against the Maintenance Loan: £467
- Skip meals at least some of the time to save money: 63%
- Used a food bank in the 2025/26 academic year: 9%
- Average monthly parental contribution: £132, down for the third year running
- Have two or more jobs, among those who work: 28%
- Want at least one change made to Student Loan repayments: 91%, with abolishing interest the most popular option at 59%
- Worry about their Student Loan repayments: 77%, a record
- Have considered dropping out over money: 46%
- Not confident about finding work after graduating: 59%, the highest since the pandemic
- Think AI will damage their graduate job prospects: 46%
“While graduates rightly complain about their debts rising well beyond what they originally borrowed, the cruel irony for current students is that it’s nowhere near enough in the first place.”
“Maintenance Loans have always fallen short of living costs, but this has become exponentially worse in recent years. In previous generations, that might have meant skipping one or two nights out or living on baked beans for a few days.”
Tom Allingham, Save the Student’s student money expert
Who Was Asked, and What That Can Tell You
This is the part most coverage of this survey will skip, and it is the part that decides how much weight the numbers can carry. Save the Student publishes its methodology openly, which is to its credit, so there is no guesswork involved.
What is published
- Sample size: 1,419 responses
- Fieldwork: students were polled between May and August 2026
- The survey was conducted entirely online
- It was distributed to Save the Student’s own followers, through student service centres and unions at some universities, and through paid social media promotion
- Figures are rounded to the nearest whole number
- The publisher is Save the Student, which has run the survey annually since 2013
What is not published
- No margin of error, because a self-selecting online sample does not support one
- No demographic weighting to the known student population
- No split of respondents by nation, repayment plan or year of study
- No Northern Ireland regional average, because too few responses were received
- No figure for the average Maintenance Loan used in the shortfall calculation, only the resulting gap
This is not official statistics
The National Student Money Survey is one organisation’s poll of people who chose to answer it. That is a real distinction, not a technicality. Nobody drew a random sample of UK students; the 1,419 people in this survey opted in, mostly through channels aimed at students who are already looking for money advice. Students who are comfortable financially have less reason to click.
The likely effect is that hardship is over-represented relative to the whole student body. The Student Loans Company’s administrative data and the Department for Education’s Student Income and Expenditure releases are the statistical counterparts, and they are built on probability samples and full population records.
What it can and cannot tell you
It can tell you
- What students under financial pressure are reporting, in their own words, in mid-2026
- How those reports have moved year on year, because the same questions have been asked in the same way for more than a decade
- What students say they want changed about Student Loans, and what they do and do not understand about them
It cannot tell you
- What the average UK student spends, because the sample is not representative of all students
- What any individual student will receive, which is set by the means test, not by an average
- Whether the shortfall is rising or falling with any precision, because the way it is calculated changed this year
A year-on-year trend from a consistent self-selecting panel is genuinely informative even when the level is not. The direction of travel here is the reliable part.
The £467 Shortfall, and How It Is Worked Out
Save the Student defines the shortfall as the difference between the average Maintenance Loan and the average amount respondents spent on living costs. At £467 a month, or £5,604 a year, it is the figure the report leads with.
Two things are worth knowing before you quote it.
1. The method changed this year, so the fall is smaller than it looks
In previous years Save the Student obtained the average Maintenance Loan through a Freedom of Information request to the Student Loans Company. This year it used the Department for Education’s own published figure instead, which it says historically produces a higher number. Reported like for like, the 2025 shortfall would have been £495 rather than the £502 published at the time. Against that comparable baseline, this year’s £467 is an improvement of £28 a month, not £35.
2. The gap is still more than double what it was in 2020
Save the Student puts the 2020 shortfall at £223 a month. Whatever happened between 2025 and 2026, the level remains far above where the decade started.
3. The loan figure behind it is not published
The report gives the spending figure and the gap, but not the average Maintenance Loan itself. Subtracting one from the other puts it at £679 a month. Set that against the average rent respondents reported, £551 a month, and roughly £128 a month is left for everything else. We have not seen the underlying Department for Education figure or the number of months it was spread over, so treat £679 as arithmetic from the published numbers rather than a figure Save the Student stated.
Where the money goes
Total spending rose by only £4 a month, well below inflation, but the composition moved sharply. Essentials went up and discretionary spending was cut to pay for them.
| Monthly outgoing | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rent | £529 | £551 | + £22 |
| Groceries | £146 | £155 | + £9 |
| Transport | £67 | £73 | + £6 |
| Clothes and shopping | £40 | £33 | − £7 |
| Takeaways and eating out | £49 | £45 | − £4 |
| Course materials | £20 | £16 | − £4 |
| Health and wellbeing | £24 | £21 | − £3 |
Selected outgoings as published by Save the Student. Rent alone accounts for 48% of the £1,146 average, and rent plus groceries for 62%. Save the Student notes that regional spending figures include students living with their parents, and that it did not receive enough responses in Northern Ireland to publish a reliable average there.
If your instalment has not arrived yet: the Maintenance Loan is paid in three instalments across the academic year, and a late payment is the most common reason a term starts with a gap. Our guide to when your student loan comes in sets out the payment dates and what to do when one is missing.
Your Own Gap: What the Loan Actually Pays
A single average shortfall is a useful campaigning number and a poor planning number. The Maintenance Loan in England is means-tested, so two students on the same course with the same rent can receive amounts that differ by more than £5,000 a year. The £467 figure is the midpoint of that spread, and almost nobody sits on it.
The table below sets the survey’s reported spending against the real 2026/27 Maintenance Loan rates for England, at both ends of the means test. The loan figures are the maxima and minima this site maintains for its calculators; the spending figures are Save the Student’s.
| Living arrangement | Loan for 2026/27 | Per month over 9 months | Survey spend | Monthly gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Away from home, outside LondonMaximum (household income £25,000 or less) | £10,830 | £1,203.33 | £1,146 | £57.33 spare |
| Away from home, outside LondonMinimum (household income £62,410 or more) | £5,048 | £560.89 | £1,146 | £585.11 short |
| Away from home, in LondonMaximum (household income £25,000 or less) | £14,135 | £1,570.56 | £1,326 | £244.56 spare |
| Away from home, in LondonMinimum (household income £70,131 or more) | £7,039 | £782.11 | £1,326 | £543.89 short |
| At your parents’ homeMaximum (household income £25,000 or less) | £9,118 | £1,013.11 | £1,146 | £132.89 short |
| At your parents’ homeMinimum (household income £58,347 or more) | £4,013 | £445.89 | £1,146 | £700.11 short |
England, full-time, 2026/27, students not entitled to benefits. Monthly figures divide the annual loan by the nine months of a typical academic year. If your tenancy runs for twelve months, divide by twelve instead: the maximum away-from-home rate outside London then works out at £902.50 a month rather than £1,203.33. Students living at their parents’ home will usually spend well below the £1,146 average because they are not paying the £551 rent in it, and the survey does not publish a separate spending figure for them, so read those two rows as an upper bound on the gap rather than a forecast.
The average hides the thing that actually matters
A student from a household earning £25,000 or less, living away from home outside London, gets £10,830. Spread over a nine-month academic year that is £1,203.33 a month, slightly more than the survey’s average spend. A student on the same course whose household income takes them to the minimum gets £5,048, which is £560.89 a month and £585.11 short. The gap between those two students is £5,782 a year. The means test, not the headline loan rate, is what decides whether a student has a shortfall at all.
That is also the mechanism behind one of the survey’s more uncomfortable findings. The English household income threshold for the full loan sits at £25,000 and has been frozen there since 2007. Save the Student points out that uprating it with inflation would put it above £40,000 today. Everyone above £25,000 receives less than the maximum, on the assumption that their parents make up the difference, and the survey found the average parental contribution has instead fallen for a third consecutive year, to £132 a month. The proportion receiving anything at all from parents dropped from 52% to 48%. Even so, only 17% of respondents said their parents do not contribute enough.
One number, two meanings. The £25,000 household income threshold for the full Maintenance Loan is coincidentally the same figure as the Plan 5 repayment threshold, which is the salary above which graduates start repaying. They are unrelated rules that happen to share a number, and confusing them is common.
Work out your own figure rather than the average. Our guide to how much Maintenance Loan you will get walks through the means test, the Maintenance Loan calculator gives you the number for your household income, and the household income bands explained shows how quickly the loan tapers as income rises.
How Students Are Actually Funding Their Degrees
The most striking thing in this section of the survey is what is missing. Asked where their money comes from, only 49% of respondents listed the Maintenance Loan at all. A part-time job (59%) and savings (52%) were both named more often.
| Source of money | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Part-time job | 59% |
| Savings | 52% |
| Maintenance Loan | 49% |
| Parents | 48% |
| Overdraft | 36% |
| Paid surveys | 30% |
| Selling possessions | 26% |
| Grants and funding | 25% |
| Friends | 20% |
| Credit cards | 19% |
| Self-employment | 7% |
| Gambling | 6% |
Respondents could select more than one source, so the figures do not sum to 100%. Drug trials and stocks and shares were each named by 5%, social media by 3%, private loans by 2%, cryptocurrencies by 1% and sex work by 1%.
Work has become a second job, sometimes literally
Among respondents who worked, the average earned £577 a month, up 5.5% on 2025’s £547 and ahead of the 2.7% CPI inflation recorded over the same period. Save the Student attributes the rise to more hours rather than better pay: the average was 38 hours a month, up from 36.
For the first time the survey asked how many jobs students hold. 72% had one, 22% had two, 5% had three and 1% had four — so over a quarter, 28%, were juggling two or more. Universities typically advise no more than 15 to 20 hours of work a week; the average respondent was well inside that at about 8.8 hours, and yet 38% still said their studies had suffered as a result.
The pressure shows up everywhere else
82% of respondents said they worry about making ends meet, back to the levels recorded at the peak of the cost of living crisis in 2022 and 2023. 85% said at least one aspect of their wellbeing had been affected by money worries: social life 62%, mental health 60% (up from 50%), diet 50%, sleep 38%, relationships 35% and grades 33%.
On borrowing, 19% said they use credit cards as a source of money, up from 15%, and 19% said they would turn to one in a cash crisis, up from 16% and the highest since 2023. Parents remain the most common emergency fallback at 54%, but that has fallen for a second year. A quarter of respondents received a bursary, grant or scholarship, unchanged for three years, while 42% felt they had never been told such funding existed — the highest since 2022.
If you are working alongside your course: student loan repayments are not deducted from a job paying under the threshold, but holding two jobs changes how the deduction is applied because each employer looks only at what it pays you. Our guides to part-time work and student loans and holding multiple jobs cover what appears on your payslip and how to claim back a deduction taken in error.
A Record 77% Worry About Repayment
The sharpest year-on-year move in the whole survey is this one. The share of students who worry about their Student Loan repayments jumped from 63% to 77% in a single year, the highest in the 11 years Save the Student has asked the question.
Asked what should change, 91% wanted at least one reform. The answers are revealing:
| Change students want | Share | Effect on a monthly payslip deduction |
|---|---|---|
| Charge no interest at all | 59% | None. Interest changes the balance, not the deduction |
| Wipe debt partially or fully for all borrowers | 51% | Would end deductions, but is not government policy |
| Lower the interest rate | 45% | None, for the same reason |
| Wipe debt for selected professions | 33% | Would end deductions for those borrowers only |
| Raise the repayment threshold | 23% | Cuts the monthly deduction for every borrower |
The least popular reform is the only one that would cut what leaves your payslip
Interest determines how fast the balance grows. The repayment threshold determines how much comes out of your pay. Abolishing interest, which 59% of students asked for, would not change a single monthly deduction; it would only affect borrowers who go on to clear the balance in full. Raising the threshold, which just 23% asked for, would reduce the deduction for everyone. Save the Student makes the same point in its report, and it is the clearest evidence in the survey that the debate has left most students behind.
What repayment actually costs on the salary students expect
Respondents expected to earn an average of £26,448 in their first graduate job, down from £26,861 last year and the first fall since 2021. That is a figure this site can do something useful with, because it is below both of the main repayment thresholds or barely above them.
Most current English undergraduates are on Plan 5, where the threshold is £25,000. On the salary students themselves expect, the deduction is about £10.86 a month. That is not a reason to dismiss the worry — salaries rise, and a Plan 5 loan runs for 40 years — but it is a very different figure from the one implied by a six-figure balance, and 77% of respondents are anxious about a number that, at the salary they anticipate, is roughly the cost of a sandwich.
Check the real number for your own salary. The monthly repayment calculator shows what comes off your payslip on any plan, repayment thresholds explained lists the current figures, and if you are unsure which plan applies to you, start with which student loan plan am I on.
What Students Do Not Know About Their Own Loan
Understanding has got worse, not better, during the year student loans dominated the news. Every one of these figures moved in the wrong direction.
Save the Student is unusually direct about why it thinks this has happened, and it points at the coverage rather than the students. Its report notes that some commentary has “strayed into misinformation”, listing three specific errors: suggesting that higher interest rates mean higher monthly repayments, quoting false interest figures, and saying that borrowers repay 9% of their total earnings rather than 9% of earnings above a threshold.
All three are wrong in the same direction: they make the loan sound more like a conventional debt than it is. There is a compounding problem too. Most of the public argument this year has been about Plan 2, which is now issued only to new borrowers from Wales, while the students answering this survey are overwhelmingly on Plan 5. A great deal of what they read genuinely does not apply to them.
Where students go for money advice, and what changed
For the first time, the survey asked about AI. 23% said they had used AI tools for financial tips. Over the same period, every established online source either fell or flatlined: money advice websites dropped from 51% to 44%, Reddit from 12% to 10%, Instagram from 15% to 14%, while TikTok held at 18% and YouTube at 11%.
Human sources went the other way. Parents rose from 57% to 61% and friends from 32% to 35%. Save the Student reads this as students becoming warier of online advice given the volume of misinformation and scams, which is a reasonable inference and a healthy instinct. Meanwhile 71% said they wish they had received better financial education at school, unchanged from last year, and 53% of those who approached their university for help said it was not easy to get, up from 50%.
A warning that follows from this. A cohort that does not know its own interest rate, does not fully understand its loan terms, and is increasingly taking financial tips from AI tools and social media is precisely the cohort that student finance scams are built to target — particularly the fake Student Finance England messages that circulate around instalment dates. Our guide to student loan scams lists the messages currently doing the rounds and how to check whether one is genuine. No legitimate organisation can get your loan cancelled or reclaim your repayments for a fee.
This Is Not the Graduate Regret Survey
We reported on a different piece of student loan polling in July, and the two are easy to confuse. They are separate pieces of research, by different organisations, asking different people different questions. Neither confirms the other.
| This survey | The July polling | |
|---|---|---|
| Publisher | Save the Student | Obsurvant |
| Published | 15 September 2026 | Reported 25 July 2026 |
| Who was asked | Current students | Graduates, looking back |
| Sample size | 1,419 responses | Not published |
| Fieldwork dates | May to August 2026 | Not published |
| Core question | Does the money cover the cost of being a student? | Would you borrow again, and did you feel informed? |
| Headline finding | A £467 monthly shortfall, and a record 77% worrying about repayment | Nearly half would not take out the loan again |
Where they do speak to each other is on financial understanding. The July polling found that confidence with numbers was the single biggest predictor of whether a graduate felt informed about the long-term cost of their loan. This survey finds current students getting less confident about the terms of theirs, not more, in the middle of a year of saturation coverage. Read together, they suggest the problem is not a shortage of information but a shortage of usable information.
Read the other one: our report on the polling that found nearly half of graduates would not borrow again covers the Obsurvant research in full, including what is and is not known about its methodology. For the parliamentary side of the argument, see our write-up of the Treasury Committee student loans report, and for the threshold freeze that triggered most of this year’s debate, our Plan 2 threshold freeze guide.
What To Do If This Is You
An average shortfall is not something you can act on. Your own shortfall is. These are the five steps that turn the survey into something useful, in order.
1. Find out what you are actually entitled to
Not the average, and not the maximum. Your Maintenance Loan is set by your household income, where you live while studying and whether you are at your parents’ home. Between the maximum and minimum away-from-home rates outside London there is £5,782 a year of difference.
2. Work out your own gap, against your own rent
Divide your annual loan by the number of months your tenancy actually runs, not by nine, and subtract your rent first. The survey’s average rent of £551 a month swallows 48% of average spending, so it is the figure that decides whether the rest is tight or impossible.
3. Check for funding you have not been told about
42% of respondents felt they had never been made aware of bursaries, grants and scholarships, and 25% received some. Separately, 11% received hardship funding from their university, averaging £1,282 each. Ask your university’s student services directly; hardship funds are rarely advertised well.
4. Know what repayment will actually cost you
If 77% of students are worried about repayment and 70% do not know their interest rate, the worry is running ahead of the facts. Establish which plan you will be on, what your threshold is and what the deduction would be at a realistic starting salary, before the anxiety compounds.
5. Be sceptical of anyone who contacts you about your loan
Financial pressure and a poor understanding of loan terms are exactly the conditions scammers look for, and instalment dates are when the fake messages spike. Student Finance England will never ask for your bank details by text, and nobody can get your loan written off for a fee.
Start here: the Maintenance Loan calculator for what you will receive, when your student loan comes in for when it arrives, and what happens if I never earn enough to repay if the balance is what is keeping you awake.
Sources
- Save the Student, “National Student Money Survey 2026 – Results”, by Jake Butler, published 15 September 2026. Source of every survey statistic on this page, including the 1,419 sample size, the May to August 2026 fieldwork dates, the £1,146 average monthly spend, the £467 shortfall and the quotes from Tom Allingham. Read in full on 20 September 2026. savethestudent.org
- GOV.UK, “Student finance: how you’re assessed and paid 2026 to 2027”. Source of the 2026/27 England Maintenance Loan maxima and minima used in the gap table, and of the £25,000 household income threshold for the full loan. gov.uk
- GOV.UK, “Repaying your student loan: what you pay”. Source of the £25,000 Plan 5 and £29,385 Plan 2 repayment thresholds and the 9% repayment rate used in the worked repayment figures. gov.uk
Every percentage and pound figure attributed to the survey above is taken from the Save the Student results page itself, not from secondary coverage of it. Figures in the “Your Own Gap” section are calculated by this site from the 2026/27 rates and are clearly separated from the survey’s own findings.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many students took part in the National Student Money Survey 2026, and when was it carried out?▼
The survey received 1,419 responses, and students were polled between May and August 2026. Save the Student published the results on 15 September 2026. It was conducted entirely online and distributed through Save the Student’s own followers, student service centres and unions at some universities, and paid social media promotion. This is the 14th annual edition; the survey has run since 2013.
Is the National Student Money Survey official statistics?▼
No. It is one organisation’s survey of students who chose to respond to it, so it is not a random or weighted sample of the UK student population and it carries no margin of error. Respondents mostly came through channels aimed at students already looking for money advice, which probably over-represents hardship. Its real strength is the year-on-year trend: the same questions have been asked in the same way since 2013, so movements between years are informative even where the absolute levels are not. For official figures, use Student Loans Company statistics and the Department for Education’s Student Income and Expenditure releases.
What is the £467 shortfall, and how is it calculated?▼
It is the difference between the average Maintenance Loan and the average amount respondents spent on living costs, which the survey puts at £1,146 a month. The gap works out at £467 a month, or £5,604 a year. Two caveats matter. The method changed this year, from a Freedom of Information request to the Student Loans Company to the Department for Education’s own published figure, so on a like-for-like basis the 2025 shortfall would have been £495 rather than the £502 reported at the time. And the gap remains more than double the £223 a month recorded in 2020.
Does the survey mean my own Maintenance Loan will be £467 a month short?▼
Not necessarily, because the loan is means-tested and the survey figure is an average across every household income. For 2026/27 in England, a student living away from home outside London receives £10,830 if household income is £25,000 or less, falling to a guaranteed minimum of £5,048 at higher incomes. Spread across a nine-month academic year, the maximum is £1,203.33 a month, which is slightly above the survey’s average spend, while the minimum is £560.89 a month, which is £585.11 short. The London maximum is £14,135 and the living-at-home maximum is £9,118. Work out your own figure rather than relying on the average.
If 77% of students worry about repayment, how much do graduates actually repay?▼
Repayment is a percentage of income above a threshold, not a percentage of the balance. Respondents to this survey expected an average first graduate salary of £26,448. On Plan 5, where the threshold is £25,000, that means repaying 9% of £1,448, which is £130.32 a year or about £10.86 a month. On Plan 2, where the threshold is £29,385, that salary is below the threshold so nothing is deducted at all. The size of the balance does not change either figure.
Would abolishing student loan interest reduce my monthly repayment?▼
No. Interest changes how fast your balance grows; it does not change what is deducted from your pay. Your monthly repayment is 9% of income above your threshold whatever the interest rate is, so abolishing interest would only benefit borrowers who go on to clear the balance in full before write-off. This is the survey’s most revealing result: 59% of students asked for interest to be abolished and only 23% asked for the repayment threshold to be raised, yet raising the threshold is the single change that would cut the monthly deduction for every borrower. Save the Student makes the same point in its report.
Related Resources
Maintenance Loan Calculator
What you will actually receive for 2026/27, based on your household income
How Much Maintenance Loan Will I Get?
The means test explained, and why two students get very different amounts
When Does My Student Loan Come In?
Instalment dates for the academic year and what to do if a payment is late
Graduates Would Not Borrow Again
The separate July polling of graduates, and what its methodology does not say
Monthly Repayment Calculator
What comes off your payslip on any plan and any salary
Student Loan Scams
The fake messages that spike around instalment dates, and how to check one
Student Loan Calculator UK Editorial Team
Editorial Team
This page is maintained by the Student Loan Calculator UK editorial team, checked against GOV.UK and Student Loans Company guidance. Read more about our editorial approach.