Same income, wildly different bursary: what seven universities actually pay

By Jamie Hartwell · Updated 24 July 2026

Two students from the same street, both with parents earning under £25,000, both starting a three-year degree this September. One firms Portsmouth and is handed £500 a year. One firms Cambridge and is handed £3,500 a year. Same money at home, same need, seven times the bursary, and nobody sat either of them down and mentioned it before they clicked accept.

Bursary money is the part of student funding almost nobody compares. It is cash your university gives you on top of your maintenance loan, purely because your household income is low, and you never pay it back. It sits outside your loan entirely. It is not taxed. But here is the catch that costs students thousands: the maintenance loan is set nationally, so it lands the same wherever you study, while the bursary is decided university by university. Which means the amount swings wildly on nothing more than which logo ends up on your offer letter.

So I went and looked. I read the funding pages of seven UK universities on 24 July 2026, every figure for a 2026/27 first-year from a household earning under £25,000. This is what the same student would be offered at each.

The gap is real money, not a rounding error

Look at the two ends of that list. At Portsmouth, £500 a year across a three-year degree comes to £1,500. At Cambridge, £3,500 a year comes to £10,500. The difference between the same student's funding at those two places comes out at £9,000 over the degree, and that is before you touch scholarships, hardship funds or the odd department grant. Nine grand of non-repayable money, decided by nothing you would find in a league table, an open-day talk, or any of the "cost of university" calculators that only ever model the loan.

The tempting response is to assume it evens out. It does not. The usual explanation is that pricey cities pay more because rent is higher. But Portsmouth and Royal Holloway are both southern universities with rents in the same bracket, and one pays more than twice the other. And this is not some elite-university quirk: Nottingham, a large mainstream university, pays nearly three times what Portsmouth pays, to a student whose family earns a bit more, not less. There is no clean rule underneath any of it. Each university picks a number, and the numbers do not track need, or cost, or anything a sixteen-year-old filling in UCAS could reasonably plan around. Nobody sat down and designed it to be unfair. It just grew up one university at a time, and no one ever made it add up.

Why almost nobody spots what they are missing

Most bursaries are assessed automatically once you have applied to Student Finance and agreed to share your household income, which sounds helpful and is exactly why the money stays invisible. There is no form that asks "do you want your bursary", no letter that lists what you turned down. The cash either lands in your account or it does not, and you never see the version of your life where you picked the university that paid three grand more for the same circumstances. You never see the gap. A Portsmouth student has no reason to know that the same circumstances would have been worth thousands more a year at a place that made them an identical offer, because nothing in the process ever puts the two numbers side by side. The comparison in the table above is one you have to go and build yourself, and virtually no applicant does.

How to check yours before you commit

This takes about ten minutes and it is worth more per minute than anything else you will do this results season. Do it before you firm a choice, and do it before you say yes to a Clearing place at eight in the morning on a phone with a queue of hundreds behind you.

Search the university's own name plus "bursary" and read the figure on its own funding page, not a summary site, because those go stale. Find the income band you fall into and note the exact amount and how it is paid, since some pay cash and some knock it off your accommodation. Do the same for your insurance choice and for any Clearing course you are seriously weighing. If two offers are close on everything else, the bursary can be the thing that decides it, and now you are choosing with the whole picture instead of half of it. That is the point.

None of this changes the loan, and none of it should be the only reason you pick a place. But it is money you are owed, sitting in plain sight on a page most people never open. Open it.

Reviewed 24 Jul 2026 · Editorial standards

Written by

Jamie Hartwell

Jamie writes UniSorted's money coverage: student loans, budgeting, bank accounts, insurance, the lot. He spent most of first year living in his overdraft, so the budgeting guides all have a bit on what to do after you have already overspent, not just before. Based in Leeds. Reach him at jamie@unisorted.co.uk.