UK Student Loan Repayment Calculator

It runs your loan forward one month at a time. Each month interest is added to the balance, then a repayment is taken — 9% of whatever you earn above your plan's threshold, or 6% for a Postgraduate Loan — and then any overpayment you have entered. Salary and thresholds step up once a year in April by the assumptions you set. The projection stops either when the balance reaches zero or when the loan is written off, whichever comes first.

Plan 1 covers English and Welsh courses started before 1 September 2012, and Northern Irish courses at any time. Plan 2 covers English and Welsh courses started between 1 September 2012 and 31 July 2023. Plan 4 is for Scottish loans funded by SAAS. Plan 5 covers English courses started on or after 1 August 2023. A Postgraduate Loan is separate and can run alongside any of them. If you are not sure, your online student loan account states the plan you are on.

Every plan has a write-off date, counted from the April you were first due to repay — which is the April after you left your course, not the date you graduated and not the date you actually started repaying. Plan 1 loans are written off after 25 years, Plan 2 after 30, Plan 4 after 30, Plan 5 after 40, and Postgraduate Loans after 30. Whatever is left on that date is cancelled, however large. Plan 1 loans taken out before 1 September 2006 are instead written off when you turn 65.

It's the salary, in today's terms, at which your outcome would flip between clearing the loan and running to write-off, with every other assumption held the same. If you are on course to clear the loan, it shows how far your income would have to fall — and stay down — before the loan would be written off instead. If you are on course for write-off, it shows the salary you would need throughout your career for the loan to be paid off instead. It is found by testing salaries in the calculator's own projection until the two outcomes meet, so it uses exactly the same rules as the rest of the page.

Only if you would otherwise clear the balance before the write-off date. This is the single most expensive misunderstanding about the system: if your loan is heading for write-off, every pound you overpay is a pound you never get back, because you are paying down a debt that was going to be cancelled anyway. Voluntary repayments cannot be refunded. Where overpaying does pay, the calculator prices it as an annual rate of return on the money you put in, so you can compare it fairly against leaving the money in savings.

Yes, and it is one of the few things that does. Student loan deductions are worked out on the same gross pay your employer uses for National Insurance, and salary sacrifice lowers that pay, so the deduction falls with it. An ordinary pension contribution does not have the same effect: under a net pay arrangement it comes off for income tax but not for National Insurance, and under relief at source it is paid out of money that has already been taxed. Whether the reduction is good news depends on your loan. If the balance is heading for write-off, a smaller deduction is pure gain. If you would otherwise clear the loan, a smaller deduction means paying for longer and paying more interest, so it is a real cost that has to be weighed against what the sacrifice puts into your pension.

Because your repayment is a share of your income rather than a figure worked out to clear the debt. If 9% of your income above the threshold comes to less than the interest charged that month, the balance grows even though you are paying every month. That is normal and expected on this system, and for a great many borrowers it continues for the whole term until the loan is written off.

No, and it is usually a mistake to treat it like one. You only repay while you earn above the threshold, repayments stop automatically if your income falls, the balance is cancelled after a fixed number of years, and it is written off entirely on death. It does not appear on your credit file and it cannot be passed to a debt collector. In practice it behaves far more like an additional payroll deduction for a fixed period than a conventional loan, which is why the case for clearing it early is much weaker than for a mortgage or a credit card.

For an employee, repayments are taken through PAYE on your gross pay each pay period, before tax but after any salary sacrifice. Because it is worked out per pay period rather than annually, a large one-off bonus can trigger a repayment even if your annual income sits below the threshold. If you are self-assessed, repayment is based on your total income for the tax year, which can include some savings, dividend and rental income. Our PAYE salary calculator shows the deduction alongside tax and National Insurance.

They are repaid at the same time but entirely separately: 9% of income above your undergraduate threshold and 6% above the £21,000 postgraduate threshold, each with its own interest rate and its own write-off date. That is why the combined deduction is not simply 15% of anything. Tick the postgraduate option in the calculator and both loans are modelled side by side, with overpayments directed at whichever one you choose.

Treat them as an illustration rather than a forecast. The thresholds and interest rates in force today are published figures and are used exactly, but a projection running twenty or forty years ahead depends on assumptions about your future salary, future threshold uprating and future RPI that nobody can know. All three are yours to change under Projection assumptions, and it is worth running the calculator again with less generous numbers to see how much the answer actually moves.

The headline total and written-off figures are the actual pounds paid or cancelled over the life of the loan, in the pounds of the years they fall in. The today's-money figures restate each of those future payments at its present-day value, discounting it back using the inflation assumption you set (2% by default, the Bank of England's target). This is a different number from RPI, which is what actually sets the interest charged on Plan 2 and Postgraduate loans — RPI is used in the loan arithmetic itself, while the inflation assumption is only used to translate the result back into money you can compare with what things cost today.

Yes. PAYE deductions are reported to the Student Loans Company only once a year, so in the final stretch it is easy to overpay by several months before the system catches up — the money is refunded, but only after the fact. The SLC will write to you when you are within about two years of clearing the balance and offer to switch you to Direct Debit, which stops exactly on time. It is worth taking up, and worth checking your balance directly rather than waiting to be told.

Yes. Selecting Share builds a link that carries your inputs — plan, balance, salary, overpayments and the rest — in the address, so opening it, whether that's you later or someone else, reproduces the same scenario rather than the defaults. On a phone this opens your normal share sheet; on desktop it copies the link to your clipboard. Nothing is sent to or stored on our servers — the whole scenario lives in the link itself.