Postgraduate Loans Explained: What You Repay and When
A Postgraduate Loan is not an extension of your undergraduate loan. It is a separate loan, on a separate plan, with its own threshold, its own repayment percentage and its own interest rate. If you have both, you repay both at the same time, and the two deductions stack.
That stacking is the thing most people discover on their first payslip after starting a graduate job, and it is worth understanding before you borrow rather than afterwards.
What You Can Borrow
For courses starting on or after 1 August 2026, students funded by England can borrow:
| Loan | Maximum |
|---|---|
| Postgraduate Master's Loan | £13,206 |
| Postgraduate Doctoral Loan | £31,122 |
Neither is means tested. The amount does not depend on your income or your family's, which is a real difference from undergraduate maintenance funding.
Both are paid directly to you rather than to the university, in three instalments of 33%, 33% and 34% across each year of the course. That means you are responsible for paying your own fees out of it, and for making the rest last. A Master's fee of £11,000 leaves very little of the £13,206 for living on, which is the single biggest planning mistake postgraduate students make.
Where It Applies
The Postgraduate Loan plan, sometimes called Plan 3, is for students funded by England and Wales.
Scotland and Northern Ireland do it differently. A Scottish postgraduate borrows on Plan 4, the same plan as Scottish undergraduates. A Northern Irish postgraduate borrows on Plan 1, the same plan as Northern Irish undergraduates. In both cases there is no separate postgraduate threshold and no second deduction, because everything sits on one plan.
What You Repay
The threshold is £21,000 a year, which is £1,750 a month or £403.84 a week, and the rate is 6% of everything above it.
Note how much lower that threshold is than any of the undergraduate plans. The lowest of those is Plan 5 at £25,000. So a postgraduate loan starts costing you money at a salary where several undergraduate plans are still charging nothing.
| Salary | Postgraduate Loan alone |
|---|---|
| £21,000 | £0 |
| £25,000 | £20.00 a month |
| £30,000 | £45.00 a month |
| £35,000 | £70.00 a month |
| £45,000 | £120.00 a month |
| £60,000 | £195.00 a month |
How It Stacks With an Undergraduate Loan
Both deductions run at once. You repay 6% above £21,000 for the postgraduate loan, and 9% above your undergraduate threshold for the other one. They do not offset, and neither replaces the other.
| Salary | Plan 2 + Postgrad | Plan 5 + Postgrad |
|---|---|---|
| £25,000 | £20.00 | £20.00 |
| £30,000 | £49.61 | £82.50 |
| £35,000 | £112.11 | £145.00 |
| £45,000 | £237.11 | £270.00 |
| £60,000 | £424.61 | £457.50 |
Interest
The Postgraduate Loan is charged at 6%, flat, whatever you earn. There is no income taper of the kind Plan 2 has.
Interest starts from the day the first instalment is paid to you, not from graduation, and it runs whether or not you are earning. Six per cent is currently the highest rate charged on any UK student loan plan, and it is the rate that makes a postgraduate balance behave most like conventional debt.
The 6% you see now reflects a cap. Without it the rate would be RPI plus 3%, which on the March 2026 RPI figure of 4.1% would be 7.1%. That cap was set by a statutory instrument covering the year to 31 August 2027 and it expires, so it is not something to plan around indefinitely.
When It Is Written Off
Thirty years after the April you were first due to repay, for students funded by England and Wales. Not thirty years from graduation, and not thirty years from your first actual payment.
The write-off periods on the two loans run independently. If you did your Master's straight after your degree, they will be roughly in step. If you went back to study a decade later, your postgraduate loan will still be running for years after your undergraduate one has gone.
Repaying Both at Once
A few mechanics worth knowing:
- Your employer takes both deductions through PAYE, and they appear on the payslip separately. Check both plan types are right, because it is a common place for payroll to get it wrong.
- Each is calculated against its own threshold in each pay period, so a bonus month produces a deduction on both.
- There is no priority order between them and no cap on the combined amount.
- If you make a voluntary repayment, you have to tell the SLC which loan it should go against. Do not assume it lands where you expect.
What a Mortgage Lender Sees
The combined figure is treated as a committed monthly expense in an affordability assessment, exactly like car finance. On £45,000 with a Plan 2 loan and a Postgraduate Loan, that is £237.11 a month of committed spending before you have paid for anything else, and it will reduce your maximum mortgage by a meaningful amount.
It does not touch your credit score, because student loans are not reported to the credit reference agencies. The effect is entirely through affordability.
Is It Worth Borrowing?
That depends on the course and what it leads to, which is not a question a repayment table can answer. What the table can tell you is the shape of the cost.
The honest framing is that the postgraduate loan is the closest thing in the system to ordinary debt: the highest interest rate, the lowest threshold, and a 30-year clock. If your Master's leads to a career where you will comfortably clear the balance, you will repay it in full with interest and you should think of it as a loan. If it does not, the write-off will do a lot of work and the deduction behaves more like a modest extra tax on the years in between.
Either way, it is worth going in knowing that the fee will eat most of the Master's loan and that repayment starts at £21,000, which is below most graduate starting salaries.
Put your expected salary through our student loan calculator to see the undergraduate deduction, then add 6% of everything above £21,000 for the postgraduate side. The combined figure is the one to plan around.