I offer you an anecdote from a colleague who shall remain nameless.

I got a digital refund from the Student Loans Company this year. I got £17. I spent it on a food shop at Aldi – the best food shop of the year. I was glowing when I got home. You only get to experience that once: the rush of being in Aldi after 5pm battling the gym goers, the 9-5ers, the students, the families, to get the ingredients for a stir fry – knowing SLC is paying

It’s heartwarming stories like this that make everything worthwhile for SLC employees. We learn from newly released statistics that my colleague’s refund was one of 310,800 this year: they got a bit less than the average refund of £250, but this was just a tiny fraction of the £78,900,000 returned to SLC customers this tax year so far.

That’s a lot of stir fry ingredients.

The digital refunds are new – they’ve only been available to eligible customers (who have made “below threshold” payments) since May 2024. This makes it easier to get money back from SLC if you have paid too much over a year – though the loans company notes that:

Customers may opt not to request a refund as their intention may be to repay the loan in full – any refund given for repayments made in any refund scenarios, excluding a loan balance that is fully repaid, will increase the loan balance and associated interest accrued.

(and I note that there are vanishingly few circumstances in which not taking the money now would make financial sense).

The government sets a repayment threshold annually – currently for plan 2 this is £27,295 a year (£2,274 a month, £524 a week). You’ve made a below threshold payment if you earn below these amounts in any pay period and yet still made a payment. There were 653,000 customers eligible for a refund – SLC contacted them all, and 75 per cent opened the email with 213,000 requesting the payment so far.

There can also be other issues with repayments – the same statistical release notes that 17,441 plan 2 customers had seen their employer specify the wrong repayment plan (at a total cost of a hair over £7m).

An astonishing 28,720 plan 2 customers have made early repayments – even more astonishingly five customers (rounding applies, clearly) have made early repayments on plan 5 loans. In this latter case these are repayments made during study (plan 5 loans have only been available August 2023 – and represent a total of £397.

A few years back there was a round of media stories around loan overpayments (due to SLC not stopping deductions in time when someone has repaid in full, died, been declared permanently disabled and unable to work, or when the repayment term has ended). Overall, 59,251 people made an extra repayment – the total funds involved are over £23m. If you are coming towards the end of your loan repayments look out for letters from SLC, and respond to them – and keep your address up to date!