Student loan repayment calculator
For 2026-27. Two things decide what comes off your payslip and most calculators get both wrong: a Postgraduate Loan is repaid alongside an undergraduate plan rather than instead of it, and the deduction is worked out on your National Insurance earnings — so how your pension is paid changes it.
Two loans, two deductions
Every undergraduate plan repays at 9% of everything you earn above its threshold. A Postgraduate Loan repays at 6% above a separate, lower threshold of £21,000. They are separate loans with separate rules, and they run at the same time. If you did an undergraduate degree and then a master's, you are repaying both.
For someone on Plan 2 with a postgraduate loan on top, that is 9% plus 6% — 15% of every pound above the Plan 2 threshold of £29,385, on top of income tax and National Insurance. Between the postgraduate threshold of £21,000 and the Plan 2 threshold, only the 6% applies. That step in the middle is why the deduction on your payslip can jump by more than a pay rise seems to justify.
At £45,000 with both loans running, 43p of your next pound goes in deductions — 15% of it to the Student Loans Company. See the take-home pay calculator for the whole picture.
Student loan repayment
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On your next £1:—
Salary sacrifice against net pay
How this was calculated
What the repayment is actually assessed on
This is the part that costs people real money. A student loan repayment is not calculated on your taxable income. It is calculated on your earnings for National Insurance purposes — and those two numbers are not the same once a pension is involved.
A salary sacrifice contribution works by reducing your contractual salary. The money never becomes your earnings at all, so it is invisible to income tax, to National Insurance and to your student loan. A net pay arrangement takes the contribution off your gross pay before income tax but after National Insurance has been worked out, so your NI-able earnings are unchanged and your repayment is unchanged. Relief at source is paid out of money you have already been taxed on, so it does not touch the repayment either.
Same contribution, same pension pot, different deduction. Here is £5,000 a year going into the pension of someone earning £45,000 with a Plan 2 loan and a postgraduate loan:
| How the pension is paid | Earnings assessed | Loan repayment |
|---|---|---|
| No pension contribution | £45,000 | £2,845 |
| Net pay arrangement | £45,000 | £2,845 |
| Salary sacrifice | £40,000 | £2,095 |
The salary sacrifice route hands back £750 a year that the net pay route does not — 15% of the £5,000 contributed, because that is the rate the two loans take together. Nothing about the pension changed. Only the mechanism did. It is worth asking your employer which one they operate before you set your contribution rate, and worth asking whether salary sacrifice is available if it is not.
One caveat you may have read about: the National Insurance exemption on salary-sacrificed pension contributions is being capped by an Act that has Royal Assent but a deferred commencement, so for 2026-27 the data layer this site calculates with records no cap at all. Either way it has no bearing on the figures above — a student loan repayment follows the earnings, not the National Insurance relief on them. The section of the Act that defers it is quoted on the methodology page.
What each plan takes
Annual repayments at three sample salaries, generated by the same engine the calculator above uses. The figure under each plan name is the monthly threshold payroll actually works to, because every pay period is assessed on its own rather than against the annual figure. Each repayment is rounded down to the whole pound, which is why twelve monthly deductions rarely add up to exactly the annual total.
| Plan | Threshold | Rate | £30,000 | £45,000 | £60,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plan 1£2,241.66 a month | £26,900 | 9% | £279 | £1,629 | £2,979 |
| Plan 2£2,448.75 a month | £29,385 | 9% | £55 | £1,405 | £2,755 |
| Plan 4 (Scotland)£2,816.25 a month | £33,795 | 9% | £0 | £1,008 | £2,358 |
| Plan 5£2,083.33 a month | £25,000 | 9% | £450 | £1,800 | £3,150 |
| Postgraduate Loan£1,750 a month | £21,000 | 6% | £540 | £1,440 | £2,340 |
| Plan 2 and Postgraduate together | — | 15% | £595 | £2,845 | £5,095 |
Why your payslip may not match a yearly figure
Income tax is cumulative: payroll looks at what you have earned so far this year and corrects itself as it goes. A student loan repayment does not work like that. Each pay period is assessed on its own, against that period's share of the threshold, and nothing is carried forward or clawed back.
That produces results people are right to find odd. A one-off bonus can trigger a repayment in the month it is paid even if your earnings for the whole year come to less than the annual threshold. Overtime, commission and a month with an extra pay date all do the same thing on a smaller scale. Nothing on the payroll side ever notices, because nothing on the payroll side is looking at the year.
If your total earnings for the year came in below the annual threshold but you had money deducted in a spike month, the Student Loans Company can refund it — but only if you ask. It is not automatic and it will not appear as a tax refund. Your annual statement is the place to check.
Two more mismatches worth knowing about. Deductions carry on until the Student Loans Company tells your employer to stop, which lags the moment the balance actually clears, so the final few payments are often overpayments waiting to be refunded — going direct debit for the last year of a loan is the usual fix. And if you have two jobs, each one applies the threshold separately, so two jobs paying below the threshold can mean no repayment at all while the same total in one job would be repaid.
Interest: what this page still will not tell you — and where the answer now lives
For a year this section refused to quote an interest rate, because the coming academic year's rates were unpublished and this site does not ship a figure it cannot trace to a primary source. That refusal did its job, and its basis has now expired: the rates are published, they have been read from their gov.uk sentences, and they live in the data layer with their own academic-year provenance:
studentLoans.*.interestRate — interest now lives in src/data/student-loan-terms.ts with its own academic-year provenance; the September 2026 uprating is tracked by that dataset’s appliesFrom note, not here.
What has not changed is this page's scope, because the underlying fact has not: interest does not change what comes off your payslip. The deduction is a fixed percentage of earnings above a threshold and is completely indifferent to the balance. Interest changes how long you repay for and whether the balance is ever cleared — a question about your whole career, and it now has its own page that answers it properly, in today's money, with every assumption shown: will you ever repay it?
What you can actually do about it
The single lever with a guaranteed return is the pension mechanism. If your employer offers salary sacrifice and you are contributing through a net pay arrangement instead, switching cuts your repayment by 15% of everything you contribute if you have both loans — £750 a year on a £5,000 contribution — and cuts your National Insurance as well. The money goes into your pension either way.
Voluntary overpayments are a different question and a much harder one. A student loan is not a normal debt: it is written off after a period that depends on which plan you are on and when you started, and if you never earn enough to clear it, overpaying simply hands over money you would never have been asked for. The write-off periods now sit in this site's data layer with their sources, and the payoff projection runs your own numbers against them — which side of the clear-or-write-off line you are on is the whole overpayment decision, so check it there before committing anything.
Finally, check what you are actually on. Being put on the wrong plan is common after a job change, and the two directions are not symmetrical: too high a threshold means an underpayment that catches up with you later, too low a threshold means you have been paying money you did not owe. Your payslip names the plan. If it disagrees with your annual statement, that is worth a phone call.
For the full picture — income tax, National Insurance, the pension methods and these loans in one place — use the take-home pay calculator. If you are near six figures, a student loan sits on top of the personal allowance taper, which is where the marginal rates on this site get genuinely uncomfortable.
Thresholds and rates are the published 2026-27 figures, last verified 2026-08-08, each one sourced on the methodology page. This is an information tool, not financial advice.
What this does not do
- Know which plan you are on. It is decided by where and when you started, not by what you studied, and getting it wrong changes the answer by more than anything else on this page — your online student loan account is the authority.
- Model a year you worked part of. Payroll deducts per pay period without reference to the annual threshold, so someone who worked six months can have repayments taken on a year's income they never earned — and can claim them back.
- Handle repayment direct to the Student Loans Company, overpayments made to clear a balance early, or the final year, where deductions continue after the loan is settled unless you switch to direct debit.
- Cover loans from outside the UK, or postgraduate loans in Scotland and Northern Ireland, which are their own arrangements rather than a plan number on a payslip.
Student loan questions the letters do not answer
- How much will I repay on my student loan each month?
- A fixed percentage of everything you earn above your plan threshold, and nothing at all below it. The balance does not affect the payment — someone owing ten thousand and someone owing eighty thousand on the same plan and the same salary pay exactly the same each month. Only the number of years differs.
- Should I pay off my student loan early?
- Rarely, and only if you can see yourself repaying the whole balance before it is written off. For everyone else a voluntary payment is money handed over for a debt that would have expired, and it never reduces the monthly deduction. Whether you are on course to clear it is now a checkable question rather than a feeling — the payoff projection page runs it with your numbers — so work that out before deciding, not the other way round.
- What happens if I have two student loan plans?
- Payroll operates one undergraduate plan at a time — the one HMRC tells your employer to run — and a postgraduate loan alongside it. It does not charge every plan you hold. This calculator follows the same rule, which is why selecting several does not simply add them together.
- Does a pension contribution reduce my student loan repayment?
- A salary sacrifice does, because it lowers your contractual pay and the repayment is worked out on that. A net pay or relief-at-source contribution does not — the repayment is calculated before it. It is one of the clearest practical differences between the three methods and it never appears in a scheme booklet.