Postgraduate loan and pensions

savy_scientist

I have a doctoral loan from a course that I left in 2023 with approx £24k remaining. I work in NHS and hope to take partial retirement from Sep 2026 reducing to 2 days a week. Under what circumstances would it make sense to pay off the student loan, or should I just keep making payments? When I fully retirement how will SLC calculate payments

QrizB

Student loans are charged as a certain % of your income above a threshold level, for a set period after the end of your course.

I'm most familiar with Plan 5 undergraduate student loans (as I've got a child with one) where it's 9% of income above £25k pa for 40 years.

Your loan won't be Plan 5, but you should be able to find the parameters fairly easily.

Marcon

Have a look at Student loan and postgraduate loan repayment guidance for employers , which could be equally useful in helping employees: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/special-rules-for-student-loans

silvercar

Welcome to the forum @savy_scientist, I'll move this to the student money saving board. A few discussions on there about paying off a loan early.

My take is (a) will you definitely be clearing the loan eventually - no point paying it off if the government will right it off and (b) could you be doing something better with the money eg pension or house deposit.

silvercar

Postgrad loans are repaid at 6% of income over £21,000. So you should be able to work out what your repayments would be on your part time salary. (Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sl3-student-loan-deduction-tables/2025-to-2026-student-and-postgraduate-loan-deduction-tables)

Your interest rate is currently 6.2%. Write off will happen 30 years after your loan first went into repayment. In normal circumstances if you left in 2023, your loan would have gone into repayment in April 2024, so will be written off in April 2054.

So you can do some calculations, but it may be that if you intend to work part time and then stop working, it may not be worth paying off your loan. If you are never going to make inroads into it, it won’t matter that the loan increases by the interest charged that is greater than your repayments, as eventually it will all be written off.