Student Maintenance – analysis December 2023

Maintenance support by household income Overall average spending figure – living away from home outside London • The median student has costs of £11,400 on essential spending across an academic year of 9 months – those with no dependents, only those not living with family and outside of London. [...] • Figure 2 looks at the split of students’ spending on different types of expense, with all figures shown as the average (mean) spending in a category as a proportion of each student’s overall spending. [...] • Working class students report spending much less on university/course costs – with better off students having a much higher proportion of their essential spending on course related costs. [...] There is also a great deal of variability in how much students spend on these costs, with 34% of better off students spending £1000 or more on these costs a year, compared to only 18% of working class students. [...] • Looking only at students with dependants and including spending on their children/dependents on top of other essential monthly spending, average costs for this group were £22,995 per year.