Student loan forecasts for England
Financial year 2025-26

Description

This document describes the data included in the ‘Student loan forecasts for England’ Official Statistics release’s underlying data files.

The methodology document should be referenced alongside this data. It provides information on the data sources, their coverage and quality as well as explaining the methodology used in producing the data.



Coverage

This release provides the latest information on forecasts for higher education and further education student loans in England. These include forecasts of student entrants, student loan outlay and student loan repayments. Only income-contingent student loans issued to students through Student Finance England are included. The forecasts are based on models developed by the Department for Education (DfE); details of quality and methodology are provided in the methodology document accompanying this publication.

This is the latest in an annual series of statistics publications on student loan forecasts. It covers forecasts produced in April 2026, primarily covering the period 2025-26 to 2030-31.



File formats and conventions

The following symbol is used in the underlying data files as follows:

     z      data not applicable

     x     data not available

     low     figures which round to 0, but are not 0

Data files

Table 4b: Forecast Resource Accounting and Budgeting (RAB) charge, by loan product

Filename: long_4b.csv
Geographic levels: National
Time period: 2025-26 to 2030-31
Content summary: Forecast Resource Accounting and Budgeting (RAB) charge, by loan product

Variable names and descriptions for this file are provided below:

Variable name  |  Variable description
----------  |  ---------------------------------------
loan_type   |  Loan type - Filter by loan type
plan_type   |  Plan type of loan - Filter by plan type
rab_charge  |  RAB charge

Footnotes:

1. Coverage: All borrowers who receive loans through Student Finance England. For further details on eligibility, please see the Student Finance England practitioner website: Link to practitioner products section on the SLC website (https://www.practitioners.slc.co.uk/products).
2. A summary timeline of the introduction of different plan types is available in Table 1.1 in the publication Methodology:  Link to student loan forecasts for England methodology (https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/methodology/student-loan-forecasts-for-england-methodology)
3. Plan 1 loans include unsold, retained and loans sold at both sale 1 and sale 2. For more information on the loan sales, go to: Sale 1:  Link to House of Commons written statement for sale 1 (https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2017-12-06/HCWS317) Sale 2:  Link to House of Commons written statement for sale 2 (https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2018-12-04/HCWS1137).
4. The RAB charge is the proportion of loan outlay made during the year that we expect not to be repaid when future repayments are valued in present terms.
5. RAB charges cannot be negative as they measure the level of government subsidy to the student loan system. If the future repayments are forecast to have a higher net present value than the initial loan outlay or the face value of the outstanding loans using the HM Treasury (HMT) discount rate then the RAB charge is required to use a discount rate equal to the rate intrinsic to the loan product, which is the rate that sets the RAB charge to 0%. Please see the Methodology document accompanying this publication for further information. Without this rule, the Master’s RAB charge in 2025-26 produced by the student loan repayment model using the HMT discount rate is –7.6%.
6. RAB charge is dependent on the proportion of Doctoral loan borrowers also taking out Master's loans. Doctoral RAB charges are not forecast for individual financial years, as the number of doctoral students with a prior Master's loan balance cannot be reliably estimated. However, a steady state Doctoral RAB charge is provided which takes into account the expectation that many borrowers will already have a Master's loan that they are repaying.
7. RAB charges have been rounded to the nearest 1%.
8. There are too few borrowers receiving Plan 1 loans to reliably produce a forecast for the RAB charge.
9. When you see the symbol 'z' this means not applicable. For example, there are no new ALL Plan 2 borrowers modelled after 2025/26.
