How little of your maintenance loan you have left after rent at each Russell Group uni

Everybody stay f*cking calm. But in 2025, rent costs a horrifyingly large amount of the maximum student maintenance loan. Rent has doubled at several Russell Group unis over the last five years. At fancy Russell Group unis, students now have disturbingly little of their maintenance loans left after paying rent. Like, at one Russell Group uni, students are spending more money on rent than they can get from their maintenance loans. How is your maintenance loan supposed to actually maintain you?

It’s not really surprising that Oxbridge has a reputation for being classist, because the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge are really high up on this list. If you go to Oxford, you’ll have an average of £1,071 of your maintenance loan left after paying rent. Cambridge students are expected to live of a grand total of… £63. Yikes. This is especially bad when you consider that the University of Cambridge actively discourages students from getting part-time jobs during term time. Oxbridge is pretty much unaffordable without grants or the bank of mummy and daddy.

At least Cambridge is pretty?

For context, the maximum maintenance student loan in the 2024/2025 academic year is £10,227 if you’re living away from your parents and outside London, then £13,348 if you’ve fled the nest but voluntarily live in London. In reality, many students end up with far smaller maintenance loans than that.

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The average annual rents come from the average amount of money students in each city with a Russell Group uni said they were spending on rent in Natwest’s most recent student survey. You with me still? So, the data takes into account the accommodation owned by unis in the city, private student halls, and student houses. Natwest didn’t have stats for Durham, Exeter or Southampton, so I got data for them from whatuni.com instead. The rent prices for Warwick is from students living in Coventry, because the University of Warwick is confusing like that.

Without further faff, here are all the Russell Group unis ranked by how little of their maintenance loans students have left after paying rent.

24. University of Sheffield, +£4,455

£5,772 average annual rent

23. Newcastle University, +£3,963

£6,264 average annual rent

22. Queen’s University Belfast, +£3,579

£6,648 average annual rent

21. University of Liverpool, +£2,967

£7,260 average annual rent

20. Durham University, +£2,943

£7,284 average annual rent

19. University of Warwick, +£2,871

£7,356 average annual rent

=17. University of Exeter, +£,2,631

£7,596 average annual rent

=17. University of Manchester, +£2,631

£7,596 average annual rent

At Manchester, you can buy 536 pints with your maintenance loan after rent

16. University of Leeds, +£2,595

£7,632 average annual rent

=14. University of Nottingham, +£2,307

£7,920 average annual rent

=14. University of Southampton, +£2,307

£7,920 average annual rent

=9. King’s College London, Imperial College London, the London School of Economics and Politics (LSE), Queen Mary University of London and University College London (UCL), +£2,157

£12,384 average annual rent

8. Cardiff University, +£2,115

£8,112 average annual rent

7. University of Glasgow, +£1,791

£8,436, average annual rent

A moment of appreciation please for Glasgow’s peng campus

6. University of Birmingham, +£1,143

£9,084 average annual rent

5. University of Oxford, +£1,071

£9,156 average annual rent

4. University of Edinburgh, +£399

£9,828 average annual rent

3. University of Bristol, +£147

£10,080 average annual rent

2. University of Cambridge, +£63

£10,164 average annual rent

1. University of York, -£105

£10,332 average annual rent

Feature image credit: Flo Norton