Graduate with most unpaid student debt in UK owes £231,384

The graduate with the most unpaid student debt in the UK owes more than £231,000, while another has racked up interest exceeding £50,000.

The figures, released by the Student Loans Company (SLC) following a Freedom of Information request by BBC News, revealed that one student repaid a record £110,000 loan in full after six years of funded study. How much student debt is owed after graduating and how long an individual has to pay it back depends on which “plan” the loan is covered by, which varies depending on the starting date of a course and the location of study.

The highest outstanding student loan balance – which comes to £231,384.24 – belongs to a Plan 2 loan holder who started their course after 1 September 2012. The individual had studied multiple courses, the SLC said. It is more than five times the average loan debt held by a graduate leaving university, which is £44,940 in England. Graduates on Plan 2 contribute 9 per cent of their income above £27,295 to repay their debts, which are written off after 30 years. The loan holder with £54,048.56 of accumulated interest was also on Plan 2, where interest is 7.7 per cent. A junior doctor told the BBC he had “no hope” of paying off his student debt of more than £103,000. Dr Luke Amos, who graduated in 2022 after seven years of study, said the figure “still shocks friends and family”. Changes announced in 2022 mean students enrolling on undergraduate courses from August 2023 will repay loans for 40 years after graduation and from a lower yearly threshold of £25,000. Undergraduate loans are typically made only to those doing their first higher education qualification, but some courses – including medicine, social work and dentistry – offer exceptions to this rule.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We’ve frozen tuition fees for the 2023/24 and 2024/25 academic years to deliver better value for students.”