Ask UniSorted: will a summer job get me taxed if I earn under £12,570?

By Alex Sheridan · Updated 12 August 2026

We don't have a mailbag yet, so this first column does the next best thing. I read r/UniUK and r/UKPersonalFinance on Reddit this week, took the four questions that kept coming back, and stripped the names off them.

Will a summer job get me taxed if I earn under £12,570?

Probably not, and if you are taxed it usually comes back. The £12,570 is the Personal Allowance, the amount you can earn in a tax year before income tax starts. People mix it up with the minimum wage, which is a different number doing a different job. Keep your total pay for the year under the allowance and you owe no income tax on it.

Payroll is where it gets messy. On an emergency code your tax is worked out on what you were paid in that one week or month, as though you earn that every week or month of the year, so a single fat August pay packet can trigger a deduction you don't owe. Getting it back is duller than it sounds. Once HMRC issues the right code your employer refunds the difference through your pay, and if it's still wrong when the tax year ends HMRC sends a P800 and settles up between June and the following March. If the letters after your code mean nothing to you, our tax code checker translates them.

National Insurance is the one that bites hardest. For 2026/27 you pay 8% on what you earn between £242 and £967 in a single week, and unlike income tax it's settled per pay packet rather than totted up across the year. Stack your shifts into one heavy week and you can pay National Insurance on a summer wage that would never trouble income tax annually. There's no automatic year-end true-up handing that back either. You'd have to apply to HMRC and show it was taken in error. Below £242 you pay nothing, though anything over £129 a week still counts towards your state pension record, which is worth knowing even if a pension feels several lifetimes away. If you want to see exactly where each of those deductions lands, our line-by-line read of a first payslip walks through a real one.

I'm moving in with my partner's family to save money. Will Student Finance cut my maintenance loan?

The lower rate is for living in your parents' home. Not for any address where you happen to pay no rent, and not for a house where somebody else's parents feed you. Regulation 90 of the Education (Student Support) Regulations 2011 pegs the lower rate to your own parents' home, and your partner's family aren't your parents, so you should keep the away-from-home rate.

For 2026/27 the maximum Maintenance Loan is £10,830 living away from your parents outside London, £14,135 in London, and £9,118 in your parents' own home. That gap is a year of food and a term's rent, so get the classification right on the application instead of quietly filing yourself into the lower band.

Don't bank on the number, though. Regulation 2 never actually defines "parent", so this rests on the plain reading of the words rather than a line you can point the Student Loans Company at, and expect them to want evidence of where you're living. It's means-tested against household income too, and a partner you live with can be counted in that assessment, so a mature student's figure can look nothing like an 18-year-old's. The maximum is only ever a maximum, and the maintenance loan calculator will get you closer to yours than the headline will.

My graduate account is going back to normal and my overdraft is being cut to zero. Will being overdrawn wreck my credit?

Sitting inside an arranged overdraft does no damage to your credit file on its own. Living in it permanently can, because a lender looking at an overdraft that never clears sees somebody stretched. The real risk is slipping into an unarranged overdraft, which is exactly what a graduate limit dropping to zero while you're still below the line sets you up for, and our explainer on student overdrafts covers how the two differ.

So don't let the switch happen to you. Ring the bank and ask whether the graduate terms can run on, because plenty of them keep the interest-free arrangement going for a year or two after you finish and won't volunteer it. If they won't move, shift the balance somewhere cheaper before the deadline and treat the clear-by date as fixed.

Freshers looks like it is all drinking. I don't really drink. Am I going to hate it?

No, though the week-one timetable will do its best to convince you otherwise. The club nights and the pre-drinks are the part of freshers with a marketing budget behind it. Most of the week is not that. Most people meet the friends they keep somewhere quieter: a seminar, a society taster, a shared kitchen, a badly run sports trial.

Every students' union runs alcohol-free events now, and the good ones put real effort in rather than parking a board-game night in a side room and calling it inclusion. The societies fair is the best afternoon of the week for this. It's sober by design, and it's where the people who aren't drinking are easiest to find. Go to that one even if you skip everything else. The friendships made at 2am rarely last to November; the slower ones do.

When the mailbag opens properly you'll be able to send your own, with your name on it only if you want it there.

Reviewed 15 Jul 2026 · Editorial standards

Written by

Alex Sheridan

Alex covers the part of university that never makes the timetable: halls, housemates, freshers, mental health, and the admin nobody warns you about. Has lived in a five-bed with a boiler that stayed broken for a full winter, which comes up more often than you would think. Student Life Editor. alex@unisorted.co.uk