Lara Reader's monthly rent in private student halls in Edinburgh is £1,022 — more than £200 higher than her monthly maintenance loan. To cover the gap she took a 20-hour-a-week contract job. The work left her missing her social life and, she told the BBC in September 2026, contributed to her failing some of her first-year exams at the University of Edinburgh. "Pricing needs to be more realistic for students from non-wealthy backgrounds," she said. Her story, reported by the BBC on 16 September 2026, is the arithmetic of student life in 2026.
The sums start with the maintenance loan. For the 2025/26 academic year, the maximum maintenance loan for a student from England living away from home outside London is £10,544 a year; in London it is £13,762, and for students living with their parents it is £8,877. For 2026/27 those maximums rise to £10,830, £14,135 and £9,118. But the maximum is only paid to students whose household income is £25,000 or below — a threshold frozen in cash terms since 2008. The National Union of Students points out that if the threshold had risen with inflation it would be around £41,000 in 2025. The average maintenance loan actually received by students in 2024/25 was £7,678, or £640 a month, according to the Student Loans Company.
The £502 gap
Set that £640 a month against what students actually spend, and the problem is plain. Save the Student's National Student Money Survey 2025, which polled 1,151 students, found the average student spends £1,142 a month on living costs: rent £529, groceries £146, transport £67, eating out and socialising £61, and the rest on bills, clothes and subscriptions. The gap between the average loan and the average spend is £502 a month. "This year's survey results confirm what we've long feared: that failing to tie maintenance loans to rising costs would lead to a never-ending cost of living crisis for students," said Tom Allingham, Save the Student's money expert.
The shortfall has grown sharply since 2021/22, according to Save the Student — a gap created when inflation ran above 10% in 2022 and 2023 while loan rates barely moved. The Higher Education Policy Institute found in May 2024 that maintenance loans in England typically cover only about half of living costs, and less in London. Nick Hillman, the institute's director, told the BBC: "Even if you receive the maximum maintenance loan rate, it may not be enough to cover both rent and other daily expenditures."
Rent is the biggest single cost, and the one that varies most by city. The NUS put the average student rent at £562.67 a month in 2025. In Scotland, students pay an average of £703 a month, the second highest in the UK after London, according to a 2026 national survey. The Sutton Trust found that for 19% of students, housing costs alone are higher than the available loan.
Two students, two cities
Mathyn Galanti, an international student from the United States studying for an education degree at the University of York, pays more than £250 a week for an en-suite studio room in privately run accommodation close to the city centre — a 40% increase on his rent from the previous year. The average student rent in York is now about £200 a week, according to the University of York Students' Union, compared with just over £100 a week in 2019. "Rent is the biggest contributor to the cost of living crisis for students in York, making up 60–80% of monthly spending," said Lewis Parrey, an officer at the students' union. Another York student, Susie Syme, told the BBC her parents pay the difference because her student loan does not cover the full cost of her accommodation.
In Edinburgh, Lara Reader's £1,022-a-month room is not an outlier either. Purpose-built student accommodation in the city has risen by almost 60% in the past ten years, the BBC reported, mostly in private halls — and the University of Edinburgh does not guarantee accommodation beyond first year, so most continuing students must find housing in the private rental market, with bills on top of rent. The university told the BBC it offered good value across a range of price points, with entry-level rents well below the average.
That somewhere is increasingly the family home. The number of students planning to live at home while studying has risen by 39.8% since 2017, according to UCAS, and the University of Edinburgh's Commuter Student Society says the cost of living is a significant, if not the primary, reason students commute. Commuting saves rent but costs time, and time is the other currency students are short of.
Work, food and the term that runs out
To plug the £502 monthly gap, 58% of students in the Save the Student survey said they work a part-time job, while 52% rely on their parents for financial support, receiving on average £146 a month. The NUS, working with pollsters Survation in May 2025, found most parents of students pay more than £200 a month to support their child at university, and almost one in ten pay more than £1,000 a month. Its report, "The Price of Ambition", says 86% of parents support their child financially while at university.
Work brings its own costs: long hours cut into study time and sleep, and Lara Reader's failed first-year exams are the sharp end of that trade-off. The NUS found in a 2024 report that 93% of students had cut back costs to save money. Socialising, clothes and holidays were cut by the majority, but more than half had cut back on food, 41% on healthcare and 11% on sanitary products.
Tuition is the part of the bill students do not see month to month, but it is rising too: the tuition fee loan rose to £9,535 for 2025/26 and to £9,790 for 2026/27. It is paid straight to the university, so it never touches a student's bank account.
Where to turn before a crisis
Students themselves are asking for the system to change, not just for better budgeting tips. The NUS is calling for maintenance support tied to inflation, caps on student rent, and funding for providers to deliver improved hardship funds. Those are the asks to watch: the 2026/27 loan rise — from £10,544 to £10,830 outside London, a 2.7% increase — does not close a £502 monthly gap, and it does not move the £25,000 threshold that has not changed since 2008.
For a student whose money is running out now, the practical routes are narrower but real. Ask the university's hardship fund before the money runs out rather than after — that is the route the NUS wants better funded. For tenancy questions, or a bill or debt problem that has stopped being a budgeting question, student unions and Citizens Advice are the first places to ask. Budget weekly rather than termly, and ask for help early. The gap is in the figures, published and checkable, before any student signs a tenancy.