Almost one in five student loans are being handed to foreign nationals, sparking fears British taxpayers could be left footing a multi-billion-pound bill for unpaid debt.
New figures show non-British citizens received around £4billion in tuition fee and maintenance loans in the last academic year, accounting for nearly 20 per cent of all lending under the student finance system.
The vast majority went to EU nationals who qualify under post-Brexit residency arrangements, with Romanians alone accounting for around one in every 20 first-time loans.
Critics have warned that the growing number of loans issued to non-British citizens could leave taxpayers exposed, with overseas borrowers estimated to be around a quarter less likely to repay their debts than British graduates.
Figures show the Treasury could be forced to write off between £1.2billion and £2.2billion a year as a result.
Under current rules, most international students are not eligible for UK student loans and are expected to fund their own tuition fees and living costs. However, exemptions exist for EU citizens and their relatives who secured rights under the post-Brexit settlement scheme.
Official figures show that of the 239,000 foreign nationals currently receiving student loans, around 195,000 have settled status.
Figures compiled by Conservative MP Neil O'Brien show the number of student loans going to non-UK citizens has almost doubled over the past decade, rising from 10.2 per cent to 19.3 per cent.
Fact Check - source: ClhatGPT
Yes. I’ve treated
“foreign” as non-UK nationality, including EU nationals, rather than using “international student” as a synonym. The important distinction is that the official loan-stock statistics are generally reported by
domicile, while the newer £4bn figure is based on
declared nationality.
Bottom line
The claim contains a
real and substantial underlying fact, but it mixes several different measures and makes some claims much stronger than the evidence supports.
The most important number for your question is:
- EU borrowers owed £5.8bn in outstanding UK student loans at 31 March 2025.
- By 31 March 2026, that had risen to £6.0bn.
- The entire English higher-education student-loan book was £266.6bn in March 2025 and £294.6bn in March 2026.
- So EU borrowers account for roughly 2.0–2.2% of the outstanding HE loan book, not anything close to 20%. (Parliament Questions and Statements)
Comment - Phylo: Perplexity and Claude confirm the highlighted above.
Using the latest 2025–26 figures:
So, on the official domicile-based figures,
EU borrowers owe about £6bn versus roughly £289bn owed by everyone else in the English HE loan book.
But there is an important caveat:
£289bn is not literally “British citizens' debt”. The government's £294.6bn figure is an
England/EU domicile measure, not a nationality breakdown. So it is not legitimate to label the whole £288.6bn as “UK citizens' debt”. (
GOV.UK)
The really interesting number: repayment
The government was specifically asked in Parliament how much EU students owe.
Its answer was:
£5.8bn outstanding at 31 March 2025.
And among EU borrowers who were liable to repay, only
38.8% were actively repaying, had fully repaid, or had their loan cancelled/written off. (
Parliament Questions and Statements)
That is a much more defensible fact than the claim that billions are
definitely going to be lost.
Fact-check of the text
1. “Almost one in five student loans are being handed to foreign nationals”
Broadly TRUE, but misleadingly worded.
The latest figures obtained by Neil O'Brien show non-UK nationals received approximately
£4bn of student-finance lending, representing about
19.3% of lending.
The government separately confirmed that
£3.794bn was paid in 2024–25 in fee and maintenance loans to undergraduate students who declared themselves non-UK nationals. (
Parallel Parliament)
However, this is
money lent during a year, not the proportion of the
total outstanding student debt.
That's a crucial distinction:
~19.3% of new lending ≠ 19.3% of outstanding debt.
The outstanding EU balance is only about
2% of the total HE loan book. (
GOV.UK)
2. “Foreign nationals received around £4bn”
TRUE, approximately.
The government figure is £3.794bn for 2024–25. The press reports round that to £4bn. (
Parallel Parliament)
And this isn't £4bn handed to random foreign students who arrived from overseas to study.
That's one of the biggest problems with the wording.
3. “The vast majority went to EU nationals”
Apparently TRUE, but the article doesn't give enough detail to establish the exact proportion.
The overwhelming issue is that many of these are people who have
UK residency rights, rather than conventional international students.
For example, the government says people with settled status can qualify for full student finance if they satisfy the residence requirements. (
GOV.UK)
So calling the entire £4bn
“foreign students” gives a rather different impression from the actual eligibility rules.
4. “Of the 239,000 foreign nationals currently receiving student loans, around 195,000 have settled status”
The figures are reported, but I would treat them as a sourced political/FOI calculation rather than an independently published headline statistic from SLC.
The Times reports the figures as coming from Student Loans Company data: approximately
239,000 foreign citizens receiving loans, of whom about
195,000 have settled status. (
The Times)
That means approximately:
195,000 / 239,000 = 81.6%
So if those figures are correct, roughly
82% of the foreign-national borrowers have settled status.
That's quite important because it demolishes the idea that this is predominantly ordinary overseas students arriving temporarily in Britain to exploit the system.
5. “Romanians alone accounting for around one in every 20 first-time loans”
Reported as TRUE, subject to the underlying SLC data.
Neil O'Brien says Romanian nationals account for approximately
5% of new loans. The Times reports the same claim. (
The Times)
There is also a striking longer-term figure:
Romanian borrowing has reportedly doubled to about £1.25bn. (
The Times)
That is worth investigating separately because it is considerably more specific than the general “foreign students” statistic.
6. “Foreign borrowers are around a quarter less likely to repay”
The underlying numbers are TRUE; the interpretation needs care.
The figures reported from parliamentary questions are:
- 51% of non-UK nationals made a repayment
- 68% of British nationals made a repayment
The relative difference is:
(68 − 51) / 68 = 25%
So saying non-UK nationals had a
25% lower repayment rate is mathematically fair. (
The Times)
But this does
not mean “25% of their loans won't be repaid”.
It means the proportion of borrowers making a repayment in that particular year was lower.
Those are very different things.
7. “The Treasury could be forced to write off £1.2bn–£2.2bn a year”
NOT established fact.
This is an estimate/argument, not an official government forecast.
The government has
not published an estimate saying it will definitely lose £1.2–£2.2bn annually because of foreign borrowers.
Neil O'Brien himself says the government doesn't publish the necessary repayment estimates for non-UK nationals and argues that losses could exceed £2bn. (
The Times)
So I'd label this:
SPECULATIVE / POLITICAL ESTIMATE, NOT ESTABLISHED FACT.
8. “International students normally aren't eligible”
TRUE.
But again, there's an important distinction.
Someone who comes to Britain from France, Germany, Romania etc. specifically to study will generally
not qualify simply because they're an EU citizen.
New EU students without settled/pre-settled status lost access to tuition-fee funding from 2021/22. (
GOV.UK)
There are exceptions for people protected by the Withdrawal Agreement/EU Settlement Scheme and other residency categories.
The £6bn figure is the one I'd use
This is the strongest number available because it comes directly from the government's own published statistics.
The latest government figures now say:
EU student-loan balance: £6.0bn at 31 March 2026.
The entire English higher-education loan balance was
£294.6bn. (
GOV.UK)
So:
£6.0bn / £294.6bn = 2.04%
In other words:
EU borrowers account for about 2% of the outstanding English HE student-loan book.
Or roughly:
£1 of every £49 of outstanding HE student debt is owed by EU borrowers.
That's radically different from saying
one in five of the UK's student debt is foreign.
It isn't.
The
one-in-five figure relates to new lending, not the accumulated debt.
And there's another very interesting number
The SLC has been trying to trace
121,000 overseas borrowers with approximately £3.4bn of outstanding loans.
Of these, approximately
42,000 EU-linked borrowers account for £893m of the debt being traced. (
Funky Media Radio)
That does
not mean £893m has been stolen or will never be repaid.
The SLC explicitly says borrowers being traced aren't necessarily defaulters: some may be unemployed, below the repayment threshold, studying, etc. (
inkl)
But it does demonstrate a genuine enforcement problem.
So what is actually owed?
Here's the cleanest way I'd present it:
As at 31 March 2026:
- Total English HE student-loan balance: £294.6bn
- EU borrower balance: £6.0bn
- EU share: ~2.0%
- Approximate non-EU/England-domiciled remainder: £288.6bn
- EU debt is therefore approximately 1/48th of the total.
And as at March 2025:
- EU balance: £5.8bn
- Total HE balance: £266.6bn
- EU share: ~2.18%. (GOV.UK)
So the claim that
foreign nationals are getting a disproportionately large amount of new lending is supported by the data.
The claim that
foreign/EU students constitute 20% of Britain's outstanding student debt is false.
And the claim that
£1.2–£2.2bn is definitely being lost every year isn't established by the official data.
One particularly important correction to the framing
You said:
“EU students are foreign students in that they are not UK citizens.”
As a matter of nationality, yes.
But that isn't necessarily the same thing as an
international student in the UK student-finance system.
An EU national who has lived here for years and has settled status can qualify for student finance under the same basic system as a UK national, subject to the residency rules. The government's own eligibility rules explicitly recognise this. (
GOV.UK)
So for a hard-numbers analysis I'd use three categories:
- UK nationals
- EU/non-UK nationals with UK residency rights
- Genuine overseas/international students without those rights
Those categories are much more informative than simply “British vs foreigners”.
My verdict on the whole passage
The core story is real, but the presentation is materially sensationalised.
| Claim | Verdict |
|---|
| ~19% of new lending goes to non-UK nationals | 🟢 Supported |
| About £4bn lent to non-UK nationals | 🟢 Supported |
| Most are EU nationals | 🟢 Likely / supported by reported data |
| ~239k foreign nationals receiving loans | 🟢 Reported SLC figure |
| ~195k have settled status | 🟢 Reported figure |
| Romanians ~5% of new loans | 🟢 Reported/supported |
| Non-UK repayment rate 51% vs British 68% | 🟢 Supported |
| Foreign borrowers are “25% less likely” to make a repayment | 🟢 Mathematically correct |
| £1.2–£2.2bn annual taxpayer loss | 🟠 Estimate, not established fact |
| 20% of outstanding debt is foreign | 🔴 False |
| EU borrowers owe ~£6bn | 🟢 Official government figure |
| EU debt is ~2% of HE loan book | 🟢 Official figures |
| £893m owed by EU-linked borrowers being traced | 🟢 Reported SLC figure, but not equivalent to £893m defaulted |
The
£6bn versus ~£289bn comparison is therefore the cleanest answer to the question you actually asked. (
GOV.UK)
If you want, I can also dig into the
country-by-country figures — Romania, Poland, Cyprus, Bulgaria etc. — and calculate how much each nationality currently owes, repayment rates, and the estimated amount at risk of never being recovered.
https://www.dailymail.com/news/arti...payers-multi-billion-pound-bill.html#comments
