The Student Living Index is dead. The problems live on

You may recall that the Index – which somehow survived through ten editions – was an annual exercise in which a high street bank divided one unreliable number by another unreliable number and used the result to rank Britain’s student cities during Clearing.

It famously told us that students in London pay £9.10 for a pint, that rents in Edinburgh had fallen to £200 a month, that student incomes had almost doubled in a year, that part-time working hours had risen 154 per cent in twelve months, and last year that Lincoln had rocketed from Britain’s least affordable student city to its cheapest in a single year – despite “N=50, unweighted”.

All of that has now gone. The city rankings, the nonsensical affordability ratio, the tiny local samples and the preposterous year-on-year comparisons are all in the past.

In its place comes something called the Student Handover Report – a “peer-to-peer guide” in which 5,019 second and third year UGs (of which more below) pass on the money lessons they wish they’d known before arriving. It’s a lot safer. It’s also not much more than a seven page marketing PDF.

Ninety-nine problems

The headline finding is that 99 per cent of students “wish they had known more about managing money before university”. Ninety-nine per cent!

That’s a figure that usually means the question was doing the heavy lifting – and sure enough, the individual items are far less dramatic (budgeting 44 per cent, saving 43 per cent, avoiding impulse buys 43 per cent), which suggests anyone ticking any item on a long checklist got counted.

On that basis 99 per cent of the population wishes it knew more about at least one thing, up to and including me.

The same trick appears to produce the 98 per cent who have “adopted new money-saving habits” – given a list including comparing prices, buying cheaper products, batch cooking and carrying a water bottle, it really would be astonishing to find a student who had done none of them.

Then there’s the side hustle economy. The PDF announces that 85 per cent of students “have a side hustle on the go”. The webpage promoting the same survey says 24 per cent have picked one up. That’s a 61 percentage point gap between two descriptions of the same dataset, published by the same bank, in the same week. My guess is that selling an old coat on Vinted has been bundled into “side hustle” in one place and not the other – but since NatWest publishes no questionnaire, no bases and no definitions, we’re left to guess. Ditto the 75 per cent who have “made money selling things they no longer need” on the PDF, who become 52 per cent on the webpage.

The methodological note declares a margin of error of plus or minus one per cent. For a simple random sample of 5,019 the actual figure at 95 per cent confidence is about 1.4 percentage points – and if this was a conventional opt-in online panel, you can’t quote a margin of sampling error at all.

Nor can NatWest quite decide who it surveyed – the PDF says “current UK undergraduates”, the webpage says second and third years, and the small print says years one to three. Who knows.

Up to £1,770. Or more

Having abandoned telling applicants what things cost, NatWest then reintroduces the problem in the FAQs at the bottom of the page – where students “typically need between £1,100 and £1,800 a month”, rent is “around £550”, and London students need “up to £1,770 or more”. “Up to” and “or more” is a range that includes every number ever conceived.

Bills apparently average £70–£120 per person, alongside figures for energy, broadband and water that may be per person or per household – it doesn’t say. None of it is sourced. This is the information a nervous applicant might use to build a budget, and it’s less documented than the survey’s advice to fill up a water bottle before going out.

And despite the editorial retirement, the Index isn’t quite dead. NatWest’s student account page still cites the 2025 Student Living Index as evidence of the range of university costs – deployed, naturally, to suggest that an overdraft “may be a handy short-term option”.

Budgeting is not a maintenance system

The bigger problem is the framing. The old Index tried to measure whether students had enough money and produced nonsense. The new report solves that by mostly declining to ask the question.

Instead, shortage is rebranded as savvy. Students are selling their belongings, tutoring, freelancing, batch cooking, walking everywhere, splitting subscriptions and turning down nights out – and the report presents all of this as a heartwarming tale of a generation “becoming financially savvy”.

Its own numbers tell a bleaker story. Ninety-two per cent have declined a social event because of money. Forty-three per cent of those working are doing more than ten hours a week. Fifty-five per cent say money has strained a friendship, and 64 per cent have invented an excuse rather than admit they couldn’t afford to go out.

Those are findings about participation, belonging and access to education – not about which students have mastered the art of “setting boundaries”.

I’ve written endlessly on here about the woeful state of maintenance support and the pitiful picture of information that warns students about costs. A bank telling students facing a four figure structural shortfall to try batch cooking and an emergency fund isn’t much better than telling someone in a house fire to be careful with matches going forward.

There’s real stuff in here that somebody should pick up properly – the friendship strain findings, the unmeasured phalanx of first-month costs, the fact that only 27 per cent feel very confident spotting scams. But that would require publishing the questionnaire, the bases, the weighting and the definitions, in a way that would enable us to tell the findings from the copywriting.

So the dangerous league table is dead, and applicants are safer for it. But students still need what they’ve needed all along – nationally coordinated, accurate, up-to-date information on what HE actually costs, and a maintenance system that covers it.

Until then, the very least a high street bank selling overdrafts can do is show its working. And the very least universities can do is resist quoting any of it. That should be easier this year – mainly because there’s nothing to brag about.