It’s that time of year again! Fresh-faced freshers are itching to leave their parents’ pads for uni, ready for a few years of hard-graft studying (and a decent helping of fun antics, obvs).
But let’s face it: we’re still in a cost-of-living crisis. Most students watch their wallets pretty closely at the best of times, but now, with soaring rents and higher food prices, money is an even bigger issue. In other words, if you’re heading off to uni in the next few weeks, you might be wondering how expensive it’s likely to be.
Helpfully, UK bank NatWest has conducted a huge study to figure out the country’s most and least affordable unis. The NatWest Student Living Index ranked university towns by surveying over 3,000 university students and looking into stuff like average accommodation costs and student incomes.
The least affordable university town in the study was Edinburgh, which combined a high cost of living with low average term-time incomes. The second most expensive place to go to uni went to Glasgow, while London came in third, with the highest reported outgoing monthly costs at an average of £1,445.32 per month.
On the flip side, the most affordable university town in the UK went to Bournemouth, thanks to its comparatively high student incomes. Cardiff, meanwhile, came second, whilst Lincoln followed in third place.
Here are the top ten most affordable university towns in the UK, according to the NatWest Student Living Index.
- Bournemouth
- Cardiff
- Lincoln
- Portsmouth
- Newcastle
- Manchester
- Leeds
- Birmingham
- Oxford
- Leicester
And here are the least affordable.
- Edinburgh
- Glasgow
- London
- Coventry
- Liverpool
- Cambridge
- Nottingham
- Lancaster
- Bristol
- Sheffield
To find out more about the Student Living Index, check out the full study on the NatWest website here.
