- Student Loans Company says highest debt has reached £252,000
- The average former student has just £50,000 in debt when they start repaying.
- Nearly three million former students have paid off loans in the past year
Nearly 2 million people owe between £50,000 and £100,000 in student loans, new data reveals.
Meanwhile, 49 people who applied for student finance owe more than £200,000.
According to a Freedom of Information request made by the BBC to the Student Loan Company, around 61,000 people have a loan balance of between £100,000 and £200,000.
The highest debt recorded by the Student Loans Company is £252,000, up from £231,000 just three months ago. It is not clear whether this is the same debt.
Backlog: More than £230bn in student loans is currently owed to the government
On average, loan holders have £48,470 in debt when they start repayment, according to figures from the Department for Education, up 9.1 per cent from £45,000 last year.
For students taking multiple or longer courses, their debts may be considerably higher.
Currently, students start making payments once they earn more than £27,295 on plan 2 if they start university after 2012.
If they started before 2021, people will repay after earning £24,990, while those who started after 2021 will repay beyond the £25,000 mark.
Scottish students start their repayments at over £31,395.
Students pay 9 per cent of their income above the threshold, and 6 per cent of their income above the £21,000 threshold for postgraduate loans.
Postgraduate courses cost around £11,000 per year in tuition fees, and the Government offers loans of up to £11,295 to cover postgraduate tuition costs.
This loan is available for the first two years of graduate studies.
Increase: Total student loan debt is £236.2bn, up from £54.4bn in 2013/14
In total, the Government currently has £236.2bn in loans to those who have completed or are enrolled in higher education at the end of the 2024 financial year, and 2.8 million people in the UK have made a student loan repayment in the financial year.
This figure is up almost 15 per cent from £205.6bn the previous year and from just £54.4bn in the 2014 financial year.
The government expects this figure to reach £460bn by the mid-2040s.
Of this £236.2 billion, almost 75 per cent is subject to repayment, meaning borrowers have incomes above the income threshold and have passed the statutory repayment deadline.
In 2012, tuition fees were increased to £9,000 per year, and further reforms increased this figure to £9,250 in 2017.
Before this, tuition fees cost just over £3,000 a year.
Students can also borrow up to £9,978 as a maintenance loan, or up to £13,022 if studying in London.
Currently, student loans are cancelled once borrowers reach age 65 under plan one, while there is a 30-year repayment period under plans two and four, and a 40-year period under plan five.
The Department for Education said £50.8m was written off in 2024, although it said the majority of this was for “Access to Higher Education” courses, for which it writes off debt after someone with an Advanced Student Loan has completed a higher education course.
