About this site

Student loan repayment is badly understood, and the numbers involved are large enough that misunderstanding them is expensive. Most people never see what their loan actually costs them over a working life, whether their balance will ever be cleared, or whether paying extra makes any difference at all.

This site exists to answer those questions with arithmetic rather than opinion. The calculator models Plan 1, Plan 2, Plan 4, Plan 5 and Postgraduate loans; the guides explain the rules behind them in plain English. Everything is free to use and there is no login.

Every repayment threshold, interest rate and write-off rule in this calculator comes from a primary official source: GOV.UK, legislation.gov.uk, HMRC, the Student Loans Company, SAAS and Student Information Scotland, Student Finance Wales and Northern Ireland, the Bank of England, and the Office for National Statistics.

Secondary sources are not accepted as evidence for any figure. That includes money blogs, news articles, comparison sites and AI-generated summaries. If a value cannot be traced to an official publication, it does not go in.

Every rule, its official citation, its effective period and its verification status are published in full on the sources page, and the modelling itself is documented in the methodology. The rules currently in use were verified as of 20 July 2026.

Financial figures go stale quietly. Thresholds change at the start of each tax year, student loan interest rates change at the start of each academic year, and savings rates drift continuously. A site that was accurate in April can be wrong by September without anyone noticing.

To prevent that, every figure on this site is re-checked against its official source on a weekly schedule. Each check works through the full set: loan thresholds and rates, write-off rules, upcoming date boundaries, figures quoted in the guides, and savings rates. Corrections are applied as a reviewed change with the official source recorded alongside them, and the “verified as of” date shown on the site is the date of the most recent completed check.

• Nothing here is financial advice. The tools produce illustrative projections to help you understand your own position and make your own decisions.
• No invented statistics. Every figure is either calculated by the published model or cited to an official source.
• Assumptions are stated wherever they affect a result, because projections that hide their assumptions are not useful.
• Corrections are made openly rather than quietly. If something here is wrong, it gets fixed and the source is recorded.
• Commercial relationships never determine what the calculator outputs or what the guides say.

There are no adverts on this site and there is no paid placement. Nobody can pay to appear in the calculator, the guides, or the comparison tables, or to change a figure.

Running costs are currently met privately. In future, some links to savings and investment providers may earn a commission when a reader opens an account. If and when that happens it will be labelled clearly on the page where it appears, and it will not change which providers are listed, the order they appear in, or the rates shown, all of which are determined by the published criteria alone.

This is an independent project, not a bank, broker, lender or financial adviser. It is not affiliated with the Student Loans Company or any government body, and it is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, because it provides information and calculation tools rather than advice or financial services.

Rather than asking you to take an author's expertise on trust, the working is published instead: the methodology describes exactly how each number is produced, and the sources page lets you check every input against the official publication it came from. If you spot an error, corrections are welcome and taken seriously.