A real comparison: staying home against Warsaw, for a student from England
What will the loan actually take from your pay?
Set the salary you expect in your first graduate job and how much you will borrow. Everything below updates as you go. No account, nothing to fill in.
GBP 30,000 is roughly three years of tuition fees at the announced caps, before any maintenance loan. Add your maintenance borrowing on top.
Out of every payslip
GBP 52
a month
Every year
GBP 624
on top of tax and NI
You pay until
2070
then the rest is written off
On GBP 32,000 you never clear the GBP 30,000. You pay GBP 624 a year for the full 40 years, GBP 24,960 in total, and the remaining GBP 5,040 is written off in 2070. That holds your pay flat in today's money, and it is the assumption doing the work here: a career where pay rises faster than prices raises the deduction every year and can clear the balance well before 2070. Treat this as the stays-put case, not a prediction.
All figures in today's money, from GOV.UK, checked 6 August 2026; SGH fee table, checked 8 August 2026. Plan 5 takes 9% of income above GBP 25,000 a year, rounded down to the whole pound on each payslip exactly as employers deduct it (HMRC student loan deduction tables, checked 8 August 2026), and anything left is written off 40 years after the April you are first due to repay, which is 2070 for a 2026 entrant on a three-year course. Plan 5 interest is RPI only, both during and after study, so the balance holds its real value and every pound you repay clears a pound of it. That is why these figures work in today's money without guessing at future inflation, and why repayment stops the moment the balance reaches zero. Held flat here: your salary, in real terms. Earn more over time and you clear it sooner; earn less and you clear it later or not at all.
Meet Priya, an example student from Manchester weighing a business degree at home against the Warsaw School of Economics. Staying home, her tuition is covered by a student loan, so it costs nothing while she studies. Abroad, student finance for England does not fund a full degree, so Warsaw is paid as she goes. Loan terms shown relate to England (Plan 5); Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland differ. One thing this page does not claim: that the two offers are interchangeable. Priya's home offer is from the University of Manchester, a Russell Group university; SGH is Poland's leading economics school. This is a comparison of the money, not the league tables, and both belong in the decision. Cheaper overall is not the same as more accessible: the loan asks for nothing up front, Warsaw asks for everything as you go. The living costs below are for Manchester the city and hold for any of its universities. Two complete columns, in pounds, using the same data and live exchange rates as the real tool.