Check Your Student Loan Balance (or Estimate It)

How to Check Your Student Loan Balance

Your real balance is in your student loan repayment account. Checking it is free and takes a few minutes once you have your sign-in details. These are the steps GOV.UK sets out^[source].

1. Go to GOV.UK's Manage your student loan balance page and select Start now. It takes you to the Student Loans Company's repayment service.
2. Sign in with three things: your Customer Reference Number or the email address on your account, your password, and the answer to your secret question, for example your mother's maiden name.
3. Read your balance. The account shows your balance, how much you have repaid towards your loan, and how much interest has been applied to it so far.
4. Open your annual statement if you want the full picture for the last tax year. GOV.UK says it is normally in your online repayment account by the end of August^[source].

If you cannot get in

Two things lock people out. The first is a forgotten Customer Reference Number, which appears on any letter or annual statement SLC has sent you. The second is a secret answer set years ago at the point of applying for funding. GOV.UK says you can reset your details using the email address you had when you applied for your loan, and that you must contact SLC if that email address has changed. If that happens, you have to confirm your identity before access is restored, so allow more than a single afternoon if you need the balance for a mortgage application or a settlement.

While you are locked out, your payslips still tell you part of the story. Each one shows the student loan deduction taken that period, and our guide to student loan deductions on your payslip explains which line to read. That gives you what you have paid. For what is left, use the balance estimator below until you can sign in.

Estimate Your Student Loan Balance

Don't know your balance and can't sign in? Or want a rough idea before you do? Tell the estimator your plan, when your course started, how long it ran and roughly what you borrowed each year. It adds the interest SLC charged on each day since, using SLC's own published rate tables, and takes off anything you have repaid.

Where to find what the estimator asks for

• Your plan. It depends on where your funding came from and when your course started. Our guide to which student loan plan you are on works it out.
• What you borrowed. Your Student Finance award letters, or the student finance account you applied with, show each year's Maintenance Loan. Most students borrowed the full tuition fee, which is why the estimator offers the fee cap for each year.
• What you have repaid. Add up the student loan line on each P60, plus any extra payments you made yourself.

How the estimate is worked out

• Payments follow the Student Finance timetable. The Tuition Fee Loan goes to your university as 25%, 25% and 50% at the start of each term, and the Maintenance Loan is paid in three instalments, one at the start of each term^[source]. A Master's Loan is split equally across the years of the course and paid as 33%, 33% and 34% each year^[source].
• Interest is charged from the day each payment is made and added monthly, at the rate in SLC's published table for your plan on each day. That includes the mid-year changes, such as Plan 1 following the Bank of England base rate in 2022 and 2023^[source]and the capped rates on Plan 2, Plan 5 and the Postgraduate Loan from 2021 to 2024^[source].
• The fee cap for each year comes from the regulations that set it: the English and Northern Irish fee regulations on legislation.gov.uk, and SAAS for Scotland, where SAAS pays fees so nothing is borrowed.
• Plan 2 interest after you leave depends on your income, which the estimator does not ask for. It uses the income band you pick and always shows the range from the lowest rate to the highest.

Once you have a balance, real or estimated, our student loan repayment calculator shows what you will repay each month and whether the loan is likely to be written off before you clear it.

How Much Student Loan Do I Owe?

You owe the figure in your repayment account, plus interest accrued since that figure was calculated, minus any repayments your employer has taken that have not yet reached SLC. There is no way to see those last two adjustments yourself. If you need the precise number, request a settlement figure, which is the only quote SLC issues against a specific date.

If you cannot see the account figure at all, the estimator above answers the question the other way round: what you borrowed, plus the interest SLC charged since, minus what you have repaid. That is the same sum SLC does. The difference is that SLC knows the exact dates and amounts, and the estimator has to assume them.

The amount you owe does not change what you repay each month. GOV.UK is clear that repayments depend on your income, not on your balance^[source]. The balance matters for two things: whether you are likely to clear the loan before it is written off, and how much a settlement would cost.

Why Your Student Loan Balance Goes Up

Interest. It is calculated daily and added to your balance every month, from the day the first payment is made to you or your university. GOV.UK says it is still added even if you are not working or your income is below the repayment threshold^[source]. So a balance can grow during a career break with nothing on your payslip to explain it.

How fast it moves depends on your plan. The rates and thresholds below apply for the current tax year.

On the higher-interest plans the balance can rise faster than a modest repayment reduces it, which is why some borrowers watch their balance climb for years while repaying every month. Our student loan interest calculator shows how the two forces net off on your own figures.

Plan 2: a higher rate while you study, then one set by income

Plan 2 charges RPI plus 3% while you are studying, currently capped at 6.0%. The rate changes on 6 April after you finish or leave your course. From then it depends on your income: RPI only at or below £29,385, rising to the full rate at £52,885 or more^[source]. That is why a Plan 2 balance usually grows fastest in the student years.

There is a second Plan 2 effect that catches people out. If you are employed, SLC adds interest at the RPI rate only during the tax year, because it does not know your total income yet. After the tax year ends, HMRC sends SLC your income details, and SLC checks the interest it charged and adjusts your balance if needed^[source]. If you earn above the lower threshold, that adjustment shows up as a step up in the balance some months after the tax year has closed.

Why Your Balance Lags Behind Your Payslips

This is the single fact that would defuse most of the anger directed at the balance screen. Your repayment does not go to SLC. Your employer takes it with tax and National Insurance and passes it to HMRC; HMRC sends the information on to SLC; SLC then updates your account. The 2026 to 2027 student loan terms and conditions set that chain out in exactly those terms. Nothing about it happens the afternoon you are paid.

The chain is also annual at its far end. GOV.UK states that SLC cannot confirm your annual income with HMRC until after the end of the tax year, which is why a refund can only be requested for a tax year that has already closed. Until that confirmation runs, the year you are living through is provisional: the deductions are real, they are on your payslips, and the balance on screen has not yet caught up with all of them.

So an in-year balance always lags, and it lags in one direction while interest pushes in the other. If you sign in in February and the figure looks as though four months of repayments have evaporated, they have not. They are in transit.

If you want to reconcile the screen against reality yourself, the arithmetic is: the balance shown, plus interest since that date, minus every deduction on your payslips that postdates it. Our guide to payslip student loan deductions explained shows which line to add up.

Signing In: Two Accounts, Two Different Jobs

Most of the confusion about managing a student loan starts before anyone sees a figure. SLC runs two separate online accounts, they look similar, and they are not interchangeable. The one you spent three years signing into as a student is the wrong one.

SLC says this plainly in its own guidance on keeping your account up to date: once you have finished or left your course you should use your online repayment account to manage your student loan, and it "has different features to the one you used while you were applying for and attending your course". There is then a third service again, separate from both, for employment details.

The practical consequence is that a search for a student loan login lands half of people in the wrong place. If the screen you reach offers to track an application or show you letters from Student Finance England, you are in the application account and your balance is not there. If it offers to check your balance, make a repayment and manage a Direct Debit, you are in the repayment account.

What you need to get in

Both accounts use the same three credentials: your Customer Reference Number or the email address on the account, your password, and your secret answer, for example your mother's maiden name. GOV.UK says that if you do not know these you can reset them using the email address you had when you applied for your loan, and that you have to contact SLC if that email address has since changed. That is the single most common reason people cannot get in, and it is worth fixing on a quiet afternoon rather than the day you need a figure for a mortgage adviser.

If a graduate email address is still on the account, change it to one you actually read. Everything SLC does at the end of the loan — the Direct Debit invitation, the refund notice — is triggered by contacting you.

The Three Different Balances

Three separate figures all get called "my student loan balance", and they are calculated on different dates for different purposes. The online account figure is the amount SLC last recorded. The annual statement figure is a snapshot of a closed tax year. The settlement figure is the only one that answers "what do I owe right now".

The gap between the first and the third is the part almost nobody explains. Interest on a student loan is calculated daily and applied to the balance each month, so between updates your real debt is quietly rising while the screen shows yesterday's number. At the same time, repayments you have already made are travelling from your employer to HMRC to SLC and are not yet subtracted. One force pushes the true figure up, the other pushes it down, and neither is visible while it is happening.

For most people this does not matter. It matters enormously in two situations: when you are close to clearing the loan, and when you are deciding whether to make a large voluntary repayment. In both cases you want a settlement figure, not the online balance.

What You Can and Cannot See in Your Account

Your repayment account is an account management tool, not a live ledger. GOV.UK lists what it lets you do: check your balance, see how much you have repaid towards your loan, see how much interest has been applied so far, make a one-off repayment, set up and amend Direct Debits, see which repayment plan you are on, and update your bank details.

That last row causes more complaints than anything else on this site. Seeing a zero balance in your account does not stop money coming out of your pay, because your employer acts on an instruction from HMRC and not on what you can see on screen. The sequence, and how to get the money back, is set out in our guide to overpaying after your loan was paid off.

What Each Figure on the Balance Screen Means

Once you are in, the account gives you several numbers at once and does not explain what any of them is measuring. They are measuring different things, on different dates, and that is where the sense of being misled comes from.

None of these is a live figure. Why the balance trails your payslips, and why that costs you nothing, is explained in why your balance lags behind your payslips.

Why Your Balance Looks Wrong

In most cases the balance is not wrong, it is out of date in a specific and predictable way. Five mechanisms account for almost every complaint. Work through them before concluding there is an error.

On Plan 2 there is one more: a step up in the balance after the tax year closes, when SLC tops up the RPI-only interest it charged during the year to the rate your income called for. That is covered in why your balance goes up.

Genuine errors do exist, and they cluster around the plan code your employer uses. If payroll applies the wrong plan, the deduction amount is wrong every month and the balance falls at the wrong rate. Check the plan shown in your repayment account against the plan on your payslip, and if they differ, read our guide to an employer deducting the wrong student loan plan.

What You Can Change Yourself

More of the account is self-service than people assume, and the handful of things that are not are worth knowing before you spend a morning on hold. SLC publishes a change-of-circumstances list on GOV.UK, and the split below follows it.

The address, phone number and email address all sit behind one screen, which GOV.UK names as "Update your personal details". Bank details are held separately and matter for two things: taking a Direct Debit, and paying you a refund. GOV.UK notes that SLC webchat advisers cannot update bank details or take repayments — you have to do it yourself in the account — so this is one job that genuinely cannot be delegated to a call.

There is no dashboard of marketing toggles here, and it is worth being clear about what "communication preferences" really means on a student loan: the account holds the letters and emails SLC has already sent you, and the contact details it will use next time. Keeping those right is the whole of it. If the email address on file is a university one you stopped reading in 2019, SLC’s attempts to tell you about a Direct Debit or a refund will go nowhere.

Two things sit outside the balance account entirely. Employment details, including telling SLC you are leaving the UK for more than three months, go through a separate service. And if you want a parent, partner or adviser to be able to speak to SLC about your account, that is consent to share, which GOV.UK says cannot be set up online once you have finished your course and are due to start repaying — it has to be done by phone or in writing, and SLC will not discuss your bank details with a third party in any case.

For anything that does need a person, the account has a webchat with an SLC adviser, open Monday to Friday, 8am to 7pm, which is an hour later than the phone lines. Every route, including the Welsh-language line, is listed on our Student Finance contact numbers and opening times page.

Direct Debit for the Final Stretch

At some point near the end of the loan, SLC will write and ask you to stop repaying through your salary and start repaying by Direct Debit. It reads like an administrative nuisance. It is the single most valuable thing the repayment account does for you, and the reason is arithmetic rather than policy.

Payroll has no brakes. Your employer deducts a percentage of everything you earn above the threshold and keeps doing it until HMRC tells it to stop, and HMRC only issues that instruction once SLC records the loan as repaid in full. GOV.UK says it can take around four weeks for salary deductions to stop after that. Four weeks of deductions on a loan that no longer exists is money you then have to notice, evidence and claim back.

A Direct Debit takes a known, exact amount each month instead, so the loan can be brought to zero rather than overshot. The 2026 to 2027 student loan terms and conditions put the window in months: if you are within 4 to 23 months of repaying your loan, you should change to repaying by Direct Debit — roughly the final two years. SLC recommends it specifically so that you do not repay more than you owe and then have to get a refund.

You set the Direct Debit up in the repayment account, which is also where you amend it or change the bank account it comes from. If you have already been overtaken by events and money has come out after the loan cleared, it is refundable in full — see claiming a student loan refund for the process and the evidence you need.

One caveat worth stating plainly: a Direct Debit in the final stretch is not the same thing as overpaying voluntarily. It changes how the last of the loan is collected, not how much you owe.

How to Get a Settlement Figure

Contact the Student Loans Company with your Customer Reference Number and your latest payslip if you are employed. SLC will tell you the total amount you owe, called the settlement amount, and the date you need to pay by, called the settlement date. You can then pay by debit card over the phone, by bank transfer or by cheque.

The settlement date exists because interest keeps accruing. If you do not pay by that date you have to contact SLC again, because the amount you owe might have changed. Treat the figure as a quote with an expiry, not as a permanent balance.

When a settlement figure matters

• Clearing the loan in full. Paying the online balance rather than the settlement amount either leaves a small residue accruing interest or overpays, and the overpayment then has to be reclaimed.
• Approaching the end of the loan through PAYE. Salary deductions have no fine control and will run past zero. Knowing the settlement figure lets you decide whether to switch to Direct Debit for the final stretch.
• Making a large voluntary repayment. Deciding whether overpaying is worthwhile depends on the real balance and the real interest rate, not on a figure that is weeks out of date, and not on an estimate.
• Divorce, probate or a formal financial disclosure. A dated figure from SLC is evidence in a way that a screenshot of an account is not.

What to Do If the Balance Is Wrong

Gather evidence before you contact anyone. Your payslips and P60 show what was deducted and when. Your repayment account shows what SLC recorded. The difference between the two, over a period long enough to rule out normal reporting lag, is the case you put to SLC. Three or four months of unexplained difference is worth raising; one month usually is not.

Separate the display problems from the record problems first. A balance that has not moved, or has moved the wrong way, is almost always the lag described above and resolves itself. A repayment plan on screen that does not match the plan your payroll is running, a loan you took out that does not appear at all, or personal details that are not yours are record problems, and those do not resolve themselves. Take a dated screenshot before you raise any of them, because the screen will have changed by the time anyone looks at it with you.

A gap between your SLC balance and our estimate is not, on its own, evidence of an error. The estimate assumes payment dates and amounts that SLC knows exactly. Use it as a sense check, and raise a query only when your payslips and SLC's record disagree.

Match the symptom to the fix

• Deductions continued after the loan cleared. This is refundable in full. See overpaid after your loan was paid off.
• Your employer is using the wrong plan. The monthly deduction is wrong at source. See employer deducting the wrong plan.
• Deductions have not stopped when they should have. See employer not stopping student loan deductions.
• You repaid more than you owed. GOV.UK sets out when a refund is due, and our guide to claiming a student loan refund covers the process and the evidence.
• You cannot tell which line on your payslip is the loan. See payslip student loan deductions explained.
• Your income includes rent, dividends or freelance work. Repayments on unearned income are reconciled through Self Assessment, not payroll. See unearned income repayment mistakes.

If SLC cannot resolve it, the loan has a formal complaints process, and the balance stands until the dispute concludes, so keep repaying in the meantime.

To query a balance by phone, call the Student Loans Company repayment enquiries line on 0300 100 0611, open Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm and closed on bank holidays. From outside the UK, call +44 141 243 3660. Have your Customer Reference Number and your most recent payslip ready. Note that this is a different number from Student Finance England’s 0300 100 0607 applications line, which cannot see your repayment account. Full contact routes are on our Student Finance contact numbers and opening times page.

Frequently Asked Questions