Everyone knows raising a child comes with a hefty price tag.
However, if you’re assuming that financial drain simply vanishes the moment they turn 18, you’re in for a rude awakening. Between university living costs, the wild price of driving lessons, and older teens sticking around the family home for far longer than previous generations, the bank of mum and dad rarely gets to close its shutters on schedule.
Preparing for that next stage usually catches households completely off guard, especially when everyday bills are already stretched to the limit. In his latest newsletter, money saving expert Martin Lewis broke down a fresh set of back to school savings tips, and one piece of guidance in particular is aimed straight at parents of secondary school pupils. If you’ve got teenagers heading through the senior years, getting ahead of this specific cost now could save your bank balance from taking an absolute battering down the line.
Parents need to think about this well before university even starts.
According to Lewis, every new school year brings children a year closer to university age, and with that comes a financial reality many parents aren’t aware of. For most students, the maintenance loan or grant they receive is effectively means tested based on their parents’ income.
In England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, though notably not in Wales, this means the amount a student can borrow is reduced, sometimes by several thousand pounds, based purely on how much their parents earn. That gap effectively becomes an unspoken expected parental contribution, one many families don’t realise exists until it actually arrives.
Lewis recommends checking your likely contribution now.
Given this, Lewis is urging parents to work out roughly how much they’re likely to need to contribute toward their child’s living costs, should they go on to university, and ideally to do so sooner rather than later. He acknowledged the figure involved may come as a shock to many families, but said early preparation could at least help soften that blow when the time actually comes.
Working out your likely contribution is fairly straightforward too, using a free calculator from Martin Lewis’s MoneySavingExpert website. Simply entering your UK nation and a rough household income gives you an estimate of what you’re likely to need to save.
What the actual figures look like
As an example, a family in England with the average gross household income of £55,200, sending their first child on a three-year course outside London while living away from home starting in 2027, would need a total of £14,010 saved to cover the gap.
That figure climbs considerably for higher earners too. A household bringing in £80,000 a year, with a child studying in London while living away from home, would need to have saved £21,300 in total, working out to £7,100 a year throughout the course.
This is separate entirely from tuition fees.
It’s important to be clear that this parental contribution has nothing to do with tuition fees at all. It exists purely to cover a student’s living costs while they study, calculated as the gap left over once their means tested loan has been factored in, and only applies to students under 25.
Lewis has previously criticised how unclear this part of the student finance system is, arguing it “isn’t made explicit” enough in official guidance, effectively leaving parents expected to cover the shortfall without ever being told directly that this responsibility exists.
The lack of clarity causes real problems for families.
According to Lewis, this lack of transparency and clear guidance often creates friction between students and their parents once the reality of the funding gap becomes apparent. In more serious cases, it can leave students in a difficult financial position, at risk of building up unmanageable debt, or even dropping out of university entirely due to cash flow problems that could have been anticipated much earlier.
MoneySavingExpert has also been clear that its calculator provides an estimate based on current funding rules and loan terms, meaning while predicting exact future costs is never entirely straightforward, the figures produced should still land broadly in the right range, assuming the wider funding system doesn’t change dramatically in the meantime.
How to actually use this information
The advice from MoneySavingExpert is to treat the calculator’s output less as a precise prediction, and more as a way to understand the rough scale of the costs involved. The goal, ultimately, is to prompt parents to start thinking seriously about how to prepare their finances for this potential future expense, well before their child actually reaches university age.
