Student accommodation in Clearing 2026: which cities still have rooms, and which are nearly out

By Tom Okafor · Updated 27 July 2026

The night before results day, thousands of people panic about the same thing: there won't be a room. They are half right. Which half depends almost entirely on the city your Clearing place lands in.

On Monday morning I counted the student lets advertised on accommodationforstudents.com, one of the biggest listing sites, for sixteen university cities. Newcastle had 1,937. Loughborough had 71. Both are proper university towns with thousands of students each, so this is not a story about big places and small ones. They are sixteen separate markets that happen to share a results day, and on the morning itself only yours matters.

Where there is still real choice

The big civic cities are not short of rooms. Newcastle was showing close to two thousand lets, Birmingham 1,269, Nottingham 1,190, Sheffield 695, Leeds 642, Leicester 541. Land a Clearing place in one of those and you have hundreds of options, which means you can afford to be the awkward one about money. A holding deposit can legally be no more than one week's rent, and it has to come off your first payment if the tenancy goes ahead. Anything above that, dressed up as a "holding fee" or an "admin charge", is banned outright by the Tenant Fees Act. You can ask for it back. Most students don't.

Some household-name student cities are tighter than their reputation. Manchester was on 351, Bristol 359, Glasgow 332, Liverpool 314. Workable, but being famous for student life does not mean the private market has spare rooms in late July. Manchester in particular goes early. Most of its stock is gone by spring.

The towns where you move within hours

The thin markets are the small campus towns, and the gap is not subtle. Loughborough was the extreme, 71 lets on the entire site. Portsmouth and Southampton sat just above it on 113 and 114, with Exeter on 147 and Cardiff on 175. In a town advertising seventy-odd rooms, the room is the emergency, not the course. If a couple of hundred people take Clearing places the same week you do, they are all chasing the same seventy.

"Apply early" is useless advice when everyone has read the same tip. In a thin city the move is narrower: have the portal open on results morning, your guarantor's details and a month's deposit ready to send, and treat the first decent room as if it is the last one, because in Loughborough it might be.

What a portal count leaves out

These are lets on one large portal on one morning. They move daily, they lean towards private landlords and purpose-built blocks, and they do not count the rooms a university keeps back inside its own halls. That last point matters more than any number above.

Halls are a separate queue, and for a Clearing student usually the better first move. Most universities hold a block of halls rooms for Clearing and late arrivals, and the offer often arrives with the place itself. You apply through the university's own accommodation office, not a listing site. Ring them the same day you accept and ask the exact question: do you have a halls place for a Clearing student starting this September, and what is the deadline. Get that answer before you spend an evening scrolling listings.

When you do sign for a private room, one line matters more than any of the photos. Your deposit has to be registered with a government-backed protection scheme within 30 days, and you are owed written proof of which one. Chase that proof. A deposit that was never protected is a summer of emails to claw back, and plenty never get protected.

The order to do it in

Accept the place. Ring the university accommodation office and ask about a guaranteed halls room for Clearing students. If that is a yes, you are done, and you can ignore every number above. If it is a no, or a waiting list, the city count starts to bite, and the smaller your city the faster you move. What the room then costs is its own fight; we put the maintenance loan up against real rents to see what is left after it. The full Clearing housing guide has the rest of the process.

Almost nothing about results day is in your control the way your grades were. The room is the exception, so make the accommodation office your first call. Your nan can wait ten minutes.

Frequently asked questions

Reviewed 27 Jul 2026 · Editorial standards

Written by

Tom Okafor

Housing Editor. Tom spent three years in shared student houses and once won a deposit dispute he had been told was not worth the paperwork, which is roughly the energy of everything he writes. Tenancies, deposits, bills, landlords, council tax. He leans on Citizens Advice and Shelter rather than vibes. tom@unisorted.co.uk