How expensive is it to study in London? Still depends who you ask

London Higher said that the provision of information on the costs of study was “too diffuse and inconsistent”.

A year on, with HEPI’s latest Minimum Income Standard putting a London student’s annual needs at £24,900, and Study London still promoting the capital without mentioning costs, I thought I’d check back in.

And you’ll never guess what happened next.

Birkbeck was quite a good start – last year it was telling students to allow for £16,000 to £17,000 per year, this year that’s been updated to £17,000 to £21,800. The problem is that the international finance “fees and payment” page advises prospective international students that £12,000–£13,000 is needed “to cover living costs for one calendar year”, and its US federal loans “estimated cost of attendance” have living costs of £25,486 for 42 weeks or £31,554 for 52 weeks. It’s bad enough when different universities quote different figures, but inside the same one…

Last year Brunel told students that they’ll need between £940 and £1,420 a month, and PGs between £1,160 and £1,600 a month. This year accommodation costs have risen significantly, and mobile phone costs have gone up £1 for PGs (?) but all its other quoted other categories – food and groceries, travel, study costs, clothes, hobbies, and social activities remain untouched by the hand of inflation since those “typical monthly expenses in 2022/2023”.

At City St George’s, Bayes’ master’s students are advised to budget £120–£220 per month for utilities, travel at £65–£130 per month, food £170–£350 per month, and entertainment £110–£220 per month. As they were last year. At the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, the estimated guide of what a student should expect to pay per week in London comes to £378.50 a week – quite a bit less than the HEPI MIS. The estimates on the cost of entertainment, travel, books and equipment, broadband/phone and “other” (toiletries, clothes, laundry, photocopying, printing) have somehow been static for four years.

At The Courtauld, the recommended budget for accommodation of £315 per week is now £230 – £350 per week, and entertainment spending has gone from £20-50 per week to £50+ per month. In many ways, cost of living information is more art than science. The University of Greenwich doesn’t guess at costs at all – but does refer students to a budget planner and a budget builder.

At Goldsmiths, the estimate on accommodation costs has gone from £158-£337 a week last year to £183-£408.50 a week now. The problem remains that its estimates on internet, TV licence and mobile phone (£6-£15 a week), food (£30-£40 a week) and entertainment (£20-£50 a week) haven’t changed in five years. Utility bills continue to be listed as just “variable”. At Guildhall, students are told that living in London (accommodation, food and travel) is likely to cost from £1,300 to £1,550 a month. That’s exactly the same figure that it was quoting in May 2022.

Full marks again to Imperial – it continues to provide likely costs for living in London in three bands, by week, month, 9 months and 12 months, with breakdowns that come from its student experience survey, and updates the numbers every year. Excellent stuff – and its central estimate has now risen to £22,041 a year (up from £21,171), though this may still fall below HEPI’s “minimum”.

At King’s, the monthly living cost estimate has actually decreased from £1,800 to £1,734. To be fair, the university has now added detailed breakdowns that were previously missing – students can now see lower/average/higher range tables and itemized monthly costs for accommodation (£1,141), food (£162), travel (£173), and personal and leisure (£258). None of them are sourced, mind.

I was quite impressed by Kingston last year – it had detail on all sorts of costs in a lower and upper range – covering everything from personal costs to cocktails. This year students are told to “research common costs” and are given a handful of example prices for things like pub meals (£15) and cinema tickets (£15+) with no sourcing or context. It lists average monthly living costs for undergraduate students on campus in the range of £1128-£2962, average costs for postgraduate students on campus as £1145-£3007, and average monthly living costs in private accommodation as £1310-£2290 – again, no sources.

At London Met students are told they’ll need “£1,529 a month to meet basic living expenses such as accommodation costs, food, books and equipment and other necessities” – adding that “this is in line with Home Office recommended figures for living inside London”. But while someone has updated prescription charges, food is still £60-£80 per week, campus meals are still £5.50-£7.00 and heating is still £600 per year – as it was in 2021.

Last year the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said that London is an expensive city but that “with some planning and budgeting” should be “possible to live, study and enjoy yourself”. To help, it listed hotel accommodation at £600-1,050 for one week, warm clothing at £500-550, entertainment at £500-650, travel at £400-500 and books at £350-550. It hasn’t touched that page since – and travel and books are as they were in 2020.

At London South Bank, each category of weekly costs is still given a lower and upper limit for those in both university and private accommodation. The total on the upper end for private accommodation has now climbed to £34,000 – a substantial increase from last year’s £28,000. Entertainment on the lower end has risen from £15 to £25 a week, though whether that buys you much more than a pint and a half in Elephant and Castle is debatable. To be fair, LSBU is one of the few institutions that has actually updated its figures across nearly every category – suggesting someone actually reviewed these numbers rather than copying last year’s spreadsheet.

Middlesex has a whole page that says it’s “a guide to help you plan your finances while you’re studying”. But then it just lists words – accommodation and bills, food and drink, transport, entertainment, “wellbeing”, clothes and shopping and “other” – with no sources on how one might guess what they cost. Meanwhile its international fees page has a video up that says housing will cost £158-160 a month, £80 for food, £95 for leisure, and £50-100 for transport. The problem? It’s from 2022.

Queen Mary has some good spreadsheets that suggest that international students will spend £20k a year outside of fees – and they’ve been updated every year for the past few years. Good stuff. RADA quotes £15,000 across 10 months, and Ravensbourne supplies a one-page budget planner template without pre-filled amounts and an undated “parents’ guide” that quotes an external NUS estimate for average annual London rent at £8,875. It’s from the accommodation costs survey of 2018!

The Royal Academy of Music has two “typical essential monthly costs” examples – one for a student in halls, one for those in a house share. Its guess on bills for the latter went from £100 a month in 2023 to £36 a month last year. The webpage hasn’t been updated – and so for those in halls, the cost of socialising, course costs (such as reeds, concert clothes, tickets to concerts, sheet music and books) and extras (like toiletries, laundry/detergent and clothes) somehow haven’t gone up since 2020. Full marks to the Royal College of Art – there’s a breakdown of costs that comes to between £15,800 and £29,100.

At Royal Holloway, there’s a page for postgrads that estimates students will need £12,500 – exactly the same “minimum” as two years ago, despite ongoing inflation. But if you actually add up the breakdown of expenses, even at the cheapest end, the lowest-cost halls (£133/week for 50 weeks = £6,650), essential living costs (£100/week = £5,200), mobile phone (£10/week = £520), entertainment at the minimum (£50/week = £2,600), and books (£500) – you’re looking at £15,470. That’s nearly £3,000 more than the “minimum” claimed at the top of the page.

The Royal Veterinary College says that students should create a budget “based on what you currently know” and “can reasonably predict” to enable them to make a “useful and informative forecast”. A link to a “flip book” on living and course costs doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2019. SOAS has a webpage on the costs that students might face – but to estimate them, students are sent off to other websites. Last year St Mary’s applied quite a dramatic update to its estimates of costs – in 2023 it was telling students in private accommodation that a minimum budget could be £620 a month – a figure that doubled to £1,040. No update this year.

At the LSE, our future economists are told that they should allow approximately £1,550 for all living expenses, including accommodation, travel, food, laundry, study costs, and other personal expenses, and are also told to allow approximately £1,300 to £1,500 per month for all living expenses. That hasn’t changed since 2023, has only gone up by £100 since 2017 – and is some distance from HEPI’s MIS.

At Trinity Laban, students are told to allow £17,500 – £28,500 per year for accommodation and living expenses. The problem is that that’s based on figures “updated as of April 2023”, likely to be some distance from that which students will experience in 2026. At UAL, the “Dean of Students office” no less recommends that the average amount required for monthly living costs in 2025 is £19,750, although there’s no breakdown. At least it’s not claiming that your weekly food shop will be £35, as it was claiming in 2023.

UCL warns students that in addition to their tuition fees, their main costs as a student will be living expenses including accommodation, food, travel, entertainment, books, clothes, etc. A couple of clicks on and there’s guesses on food, course materials, mobile phone and health and wellbeing – although the source of said guesses is “the Save the Student survey for 2024 and uprated by 10% to reflect the current rate of inflation”. That’s a survey that also said that three in five students skip meals to save money and 10 per cent used a food bank, which might not make it the best way to estimate costs.

UEL “understands that cost of living is a big concern to students” and even has “a dedicated Student Money Advice and Rights Team (SMART) who can provide one-to-one advice”. That page doesn’t, however, seem to offer any advice on the costs students might face. A couple of blogs do – in March 2025, accommodation started at £800/month. Five months later accommodation in East London could be found for £600 a month.

I’m missing out the University of London and the University of Reading, and while Roehampton seems to have all sorts of help on offer, it doesn’t seem to have anything on estimated or likely costs. UWL has a breakdown of student living costs sourced from the Natwest Student Living Index (August 2024), although given the way that survey works it may as well have picked numbers out of a hat. And at Westminster, being in a “large and potentially expensive city like London” means that on average, students “can spend around £475 per week on rent and living costs”. That’s the same figure it was headlining with in 2022.

So a year on, some universities have genuinely updated – lifting ranges, adding proper breakdowns, maintaining annual refresh cycles, reviewing categories across the board. But most of the same problems persist.

London universities describe three different cities – Austerity London (£12,000–£16,000), Budget London (£16,600–£20,800), and Realistic London (£22,000–£30,000) – with no coordination, no shared methodology, and in many cases no visible update cycle. A third don’t publish a London figure at all. Several still explicitly anchor to UKVI’s visa threshold despite it sitting roughly a third per cent below what students report actually needing, plenty point students at problematic research, and most that do offer guidance don’t source their figures.

Study London continues to promote “world-class education” without mentioning that HEPI’s Minimum Income Standard puts the cost of accessing it at £24,900 a year. London Higher coordinates that marketing campaign – it could coordinate a cost-of-living methodology, with shared categories, agreed sources, an annual refresh, external benchmarking to MIS, and an absolute ban on presenting UKVI thresholds as budgets. It should.