How do universities and students get paid?

Your campus may be preparing to welcome a new cohort of undergraduates – your institutional finance team will have to wait a little longer to pay for it all.

The first payment of tuition fees from the Student Loans Company to providers will happen on 21 October this year, representing 25 per cent of the total tuition fee for each home undergraduate. Overall, SLC pays out around £11.5bn in tuition fee loans each year – the three major payment dates with respect to undergraduate students starting in the autumn (21 October, a further 25 per cent on 3 February, and the remaining 50 per cent on 29 April) will be three of the busiest days of the year for the UKs banking system.

In order for these funds to be released your university has to confirm that students are actually attending their course – there are three liability points, each less than a week before the payment date, where attendance confirmation is required (going beyond enrollment to actual engagement with learning and teaching activities). No attendance: no fee.

While universities and colleges can wait a few weeks for fee income, the same is not the case for student maintenance. Moving and accommodation costs, alongside the need to cover living costs in those first few weeks mean that maintenance payments are linked to enrollment. If you are of a certain age you might remember a long dreary queue to fill in a bunch of forms and get a student card: these days enrollment and registration generally happens online and before a student gets to the campus.

Even so, maintenance hits a student bank account very shortly after the start of term (usually within five working days). Despite the early payment, it is linked to attendance reporting – students who never turn up at all lose eligibility even to the first chunk (it is an equal split across the three payments, except in Scotland.)

The other variable in all this is the statutory cooling off period – this is variable across the sector but two weeks (the statutory minimum for any contract) is the norm. Before this point, providers cannot confirm attendance – if the student leaves the course before the cooling period is up they are not liable for fee repayments. This doesn’t affect the maintenance loan – if you turn up at all this is returned via the standard repayment process (if you somehow never turned up at university at all but still got a maintenance loan SLC would need you to repay the loan immediately.)

Ah, but what about the LLE?

These, at least, have been the rules for standard undergraduate attendance thus far. For students starting their courses from January 2027 onwards, a new set of rules (indeed, a new funding method in England) will apply.

The Lifelong Learning Entitlement means that students no longer have to study complete academic years, and this has ramifications for the way providers are paid. If the length of a course is less than thirteen weeks (so, 136 days or less) you get the entire fee as a single payment, based on one attendance confirmation (there’s also a registration confirmation required). For longer periods of study each term (of up to 13 weeks) adds another confirmation point and another payment, up to a maximum of four (25 per cent of the total each) in a single academic year.

Importantly, the fee and maintenance loan amounts are linked to the amount of academic credit a student is taking, rather than the duration of study. It is possible to imagine a 13 week 120 credit module: any student brave enough to take this monstrosity would technically be entitled to receive the same amount of maintenance as a student taking a full academic year, just in a single payment. The government has spotted this issue, and has decreed that you can only claim for 5 credits (the equivalent, remember, of 50 hours a week) of study for each week of a 13 week term. This makes the 30 credit module over 13 weeks a de-facto standard for students looking for maintenance support.

Following the logic through, if a course starts on 1 September you can confirm registration at any point (up to 30 days before the start of the course) to unlock maintenance payments, which usually happen . You can confirm attendance from 14 days (the statutory cooling off period, some providers may allow longer) at which point fee payments – and student liability for fee loan repayments – kick in. In this case the first fee payment would be on the third Wednesday in October.

Student maintenance payments are available for up to 180 credits worth of learning a year – this would include stuff like accelerated degree courses, alongside a learner simply deciding to take a bunch of 30 credit modules in a row. In the latter case, attendance and registration confirmation on each individual course would be required to unlock each chunk of maintenance, while for a traditional course it would be just one registration and four attendance confirmations.