University budget 2026

[Bk101]

I'd be really grateful to hear from parents of current students what you think a reasonable monthly student budget is excluding accommodation outside London. My daughter is off to cardiff on a very full time course so no opportunity to work part time. All the online sites indicate somewhere around mid £500s a month is reasonable however she's worked out a budget of double that and when I check her assumptions, they are mostly reasonable, I get it down to about £800. Some real life experience appreciated as I don't want her to struggle but equally don't want to be funding a massively extravagant life style.

My DC has £3.5k for the year - beyond the cost of their accom.

You can view this as about £110 per week for 30 weeks term time, or less than that if spread over full year.

From this they buy their food and as they are 3rd year, cover their bills.

They tend to be in uni city for about 35 weeks of year but can be there all year.

In previous years, they have had enough left to pay for a summer hol. They have socialised, joined clubs, gone to balls and visited friends at other unis for the odd weekend away.

In the hols at home they don’t have any food costs. They still pay into their house bills account, but usage of electricity etc is obv just standing charges in hols.

Asking DS, he says his supermarket shop is £30-40 per week. He pays £15 per week into the house bills account. He usually spends about £30 going out.

Uni nights out are often cheap - college bars charge £2 a pint and stuff in college is often free/v cheap. Spoons is also cheap.

When he started he had to pay JCR fees in his college and for a freshers pass . The first couple of weeks are expensive. But he has his full term if spending money upfront and knows there are expensive and cheap weeks.

He has never worked in term time. In the summer he has had various jobs and probably earns £1.5k.

Tbh, if you give them £200 a week, many will spend it. They will buy their food and go out…and quite likely be spending over £50 per week on clothes/Amazon. That’s prob £200+ per month.

Obv lots of people can afford to give lots. In fact we could give much more…but DC really doesn’t need all that and is having a great time on about £100 a week. This years holiday they they booked with left over money was £500.

Ignoring accommodation costs and utility bills, DD gets £5000pa and has had that for first three years at uni. That is more than enough (so we've not inflated it at all), and she's hardly worked (just a month of work over the three years). She doesn't drink or go clubbing but does spend quite a lot on clothes, toiletries and hobbies and certainly eats better than I did as a student (Sainsburys not Aldi; Costa drinks/treats regularly). DD is pretty sure from what others have said that she has more than her friends or housemates who are all reliant on loans and jobs - so she keeps quiet about how much she has so as not to sound boastful. We wanted her to have enough to not have to worry, but not so much that either she stood out from others or had no incentive to work, and £5000pa has probably tipped into having too much. So I don't suggest you go for anything close to £800+.

This is great to read as first DD is off to uni. She’ll have NHS bursary of £5000 so I was thinking she can live off that. I thought we’ll pay her phone and give her £100 a month . She has worked all summer but not managed to save much so I was a bit worried but sounds like she’ll be about average hopefully

We wanted her to have enough to not have to worry, but not so much that either she stood out from others or had no incentive to work

I think this is a really interesting point. In theory there should be a range of people at university, but I wonder if some universities have a more or a less affluent demographic than others.

DD, like others, is living off the minimum maintenance loan, plus some paid work. She's found that puts her fairly in the middle of people she knows. Some have lots of money - shop at Waitrose, buy branded clothes etc. Others have year round jobs to make ends meet. So perhaps OP needs to think about it from the perspective of her DD's peers are likely to have? Some universities - I'm going to suggest Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, London universities probably attract a "richer" student set than "random Northern, not big name" university (with apologies to "random Northern university").

I have no idea what the situation at Cardiff might be - perhaps it would be interesting for OP to get more specific feedback?

@redskyAtNigh yes that’s a good point. If she’s Cardiff there will be more Welsh students with their higher loans.
My DD was In a very mixed flat yr1. Some from an expensive boarding school fully funded by parents, NI, Welsh, Scottish, English loans and a wealthy international student. Very different spending habits eg some constantly ordered food to be delivered never cooked, lots of eating out and Ubers.

We gave approx £3600 this year - term time only and shorter terms so it worked out £150 a week
I reckon they could have managed on £100 pw and still had money left over

We pay for accommodation and bills and give £50 a week for food (term time only). They then have the minimum maintenance loan for everything else. We do pay for big ticket items too (e.g annual sports club membership, train tickets if they need to come home).

edited to add that they both feel like this is enough to live off without stressing but equally they have to think about what they are spending.

24 week terms (Oxbridge?). What do they do in the holidays? I get that lots of students work in the summer, but it must be more difficult to find a job in the shorter holidays unless you are one of those very lucky students who manage to find an employer who kept their sixth form job open for them once they went to uni.

No work at Christmas or Easter as lots of uni work to cover
Summer work was possible but hasn't happened

Mostly study. Most colleges have start-of-term exams (often called "collections") to check you've done the holiday assignments/reading/revision. (Back in the day, I managed a summer job, but certainly not the other two breaks, just as with @Roomgigi's post.)

But even if they just stay at home and study the whole time there are still outlays for toiletries/clothes/haircuts/phone/presents/books for next term etc. Or do you fund all those? I mean Roomgigi's £150 a week is generous anyway, but I suspect it's spread across more weeks than just term time.

And, it also affects the overall budget if you, as the parent are going to to cover a lot of expenses over holidays, compared to if you are not.

We're paying accommodation and letting him live off his minimum maintenance loan, but he is very aware he needs to get a job.
We pay for his phone and he can use our streaming logins.
Its important they learn to budget and live within their means.
He will likely get the occasionally top up when we see him and his gran will send money

We give £50 a week in term term. Loan covers accommodation. We pay for a basic SIM contract, and buy some cupboard essentials at the start of the year. Previous savings covers extras and they work in holidays. Christmas presents include nice toiletries etc. If doing a healthcare course in Wales do you not get a bursary? £800 a month is huge, have you led her to believe you will pay this? That's a massive commitment. Fine if you can manage it but it's certainly not necessary. She maybe needs to learn that budgeting is working out how much you have left for fun things after essentials, not listing everything you want and then asking for it. Totally up to you what you give though, and you don't need to share that with anyone else.

All those saying they pay for accommodation and student lives off minimum loan, that's a lot per week, they certainly shouldn't be struggling on that as it's much more than lots of fellow students will have. Obviously, it's up to your family how to do it.

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The thing is, accommodation varies a lot.

In some places it’s over £10k. If you then have the min maintenance loan for living on, you’ve got over £15k per year.

If you’re in that £10k accom and get £800 per month for 12 months, that’s another £9600k totally nearly £20k per year.

For someone in £5-6k accom, the totals are significantly different.

If the full student loan has increased with inflation it would be about £12.25k. So that’s where I started from.

In their year my Dc was in catered accom costing £9.5k. They then £2.75k for everything else. I wasn’t interested in if it can from loan/parents but they had enough to live on. They had about £85 per week for 30 weeks of term time - fine for someone with 21 meals already provided per week.

In 2nd yr their private rent cost £8.5k. They then had £3.75k for everything else - that was food, utility bills, socialising etc.

If they can manage on less than what parents give for accom and the full maintenance loan avail to them, I’d just take less loan.

Yes,it won’t impact their monthly payments when they start work, but will be cleared earlier and compound less - saving them thousands potentially.

I think parents work on paying rent selves and then giving min maintenance loan for living for simplistic terms. But actually it means many students get a lot….and also debt that’s avoidable.

Work backwards. What do they need? What are you going to contribute as parents or the students themselves. Then take as little loan as possible. I think they will thank you later in their 30s when they are paying their loans still as well as childcare etc.

Yes we budgeted for £12 k for the year which is a bit above the max. Thankfully she's at quite a cheap uni so accommodation for this year and next is about £5700 so we pay that and £500 every month (holidays as well). Obviously she doesn't spend much during the holidays so she's saving most of it for year 3 abroad and driving lessons next term.

I think it's Clary who always reminds people to take accommodation costs into account when choosing unis and I completely agree with her.

We're making a big commitment by paying tuition and accommodation so that DS comes out debt-free, which we're obviously lucky to be able to do. But we want to teach him that money doesn't otherwise grow on trees, so won't be giving loads monthly on top. He's in fully catered for first year, and we're planning to give about £250 a month for extras. He's earned a few grand over the summer holidays, so he's putting that in a separate savings account, and he knows he can dip into that if he wants expensive extras. He probably won't, though - he doesn't drink and won't be clubbing etc. Anything he saves, he can keep. He does like nice food, so I can see him spending more second year when he's not in catered.

I don’t have a child in Uni, but I was one until not long ago. Never had any help of my parents and my course was also full on in London and worked 50hours weeks on top to pay the bills. It is great you want and can help your daughter however I also studied my postgrad in Cardiff. I was paid a stipend of £1600 and I could save at least £500 a month. I lived alone in a flat. That was in 2019-2021. I moved to Newport after in 2023 to save on rent as prices went up despite my salary increase and on a salary of £2400 my bills came to £1700 that included rent, council tax, water, internet, gas and electric, phone, credit card repayments to about £1000 a month. Then add food, household stuff, gym and yoga memberships and driving lessons. The driving lessons were £250 a month! If this is her budget excluding rent (and I assume bills if she lives in shared accommodation) - £1000 of spending money is a lot… I think you are right that £500-600 should be enough with bills paid to cover food, transport, gym and essentials. If she wants fun money she absolutely CAN work part-time. I understand parents concerns about courses being full on but I have 3 degrees and still worked. Even in my PhD when I was in the lab 50h weeks I was teaching and doing private lessons. She can work, she doesn’t want to. It is all great to support her financially but she needs to learn financial responsibility and to take care of herself, otherwise she will likely struggle to get a job after uni. The labour market is not what it was.

Ah., got you! Yes, I think you're right. (We paid our DC evenly over the whole year; when we were funding food at home they could build up a buffer for the next term.)

My daughter is a mature student so is financially independent from us.

In her first year she lived off her maximum loan. Despite having previously worked full time for three years she couldn’t find a job. She pays for her own phone & rent etc.

last year she did manage to get work so she has an extra £200 ish a week plus more in the holidays. which she uses to run a car & go on holiday/to watch the F1/buy merch. All stuff that’s not essential.

The loan is paid back at the same amount regardless of the total amount. And, unless very high earners, most people will be paying them off in their 30s when they have childcare etc regardless of whether they lived frugally and made do with the odd grand or so less to live on.

We give them the equivelent of SMP enough to have a reasonable standard of living. On top of rent and fees.

With compound interest which builds all the time, the interest added and period the loan will last for can be substantially longer if the loan is bigger.

Yes, the amount per month will not vary as determined by earnings. However, it could be that it accrues interest for another 10 years as it takes 10 years longer to pay off at that 9% rate.

So it’s short-sighted to say ‘borrow the max available’ if you don’t need to, in terms of future impact. It’s like taking out a bigger mortgage that you can only afford by taking it out over a longer term - more debt to repay, more interest overall, longer paying.

Honestly it’s really worth thinking about it. Maybe it won’t make the difference in their 30s…but what about in their late 40s and 50s when they might be funding their own kids through uni too?? Smaller student loan likely to have been paid off before then, bigger is paid off more slowly so keep having interest added.

We have only paid for the term time weeks but food and sundries are covered when at home. YP is lucky that they don't have travel costs when at uni as it's all walkable.

We made a decision that YP wouldn't take the maintenance loan so we are funding them. If they had taken the loan it would be a different story.