Halls vs the loan, university by university

What university halls actually cost at 37 UK universities — from each university's own price list, not a survey — and how much of the maximum maintenance loan the cheapest room eats.

Sorted cheapest first. "% of max loan" is the cheapest self-catered room across its full contract against the 2026/27 England maximum (£10,830 outside London, £14,135 in London). Most students get less than the maximum — entitlement tapers with household income.

Universities not in the table

University of Edinburgh — Not verified: Edinburgh's accommodation site refused every automated request, and no official per-room weekly rate could be read. The university does publish that self-catered accommodation averages £925 a month across a £414-£1,348 range on 39-week leases, but converting that to a weekly rate would require assuming how many months it is spread over, so no figure is given.

University of Leicester — NOT VERIFIED. le.ac.uk returns HTTP 403 Forbidden to every request from this environment (tested the fees page, the accommodation index, the room-search pages and reslife.le.ac.uk property links; reslife.le.ac.uk loads but carries no prices, only 'prices vary depending on the property'). No official Leicester fee table or PDF could be read, and archive.org was unavailable. Search-engine snippets of Leicester's own fees page quote 'self-catered, fully furnished accommodation from £74 per week (2026/27)' and Opal Court 'from £149 per week' for 2026/27, but I could not open the page to confirm those figures, see the top of the range, or find contract lengths, so no numbers are reported. Requires a manual check of le.ac.uk/study/undergraduates/accommodation/fees.

University of Oxford — No university-wide figure exists. Each college owns its own stock, sets its own rents, and charges per night against eight-week terms rather than per week across a long let, so a single comparable weekly rate would be an invention. As a worked example, University College's 2025/26 contracts equate to £188-£215 a week. Most colleges are catered, with meals billed separately on top of the room charge.

These are not omissions. Neither publishes a weekly rate that can be compared with the others, and a number invented to fill the row would defeat the point of the table.

Where these numbers come from

Each university's own accommodation pricing pages, read 19 August 2026 and source-linked on every page; loan maxima from GOV.UK. If a figure here is wrong, it is a mistake rather than a marketing choice, and it gets corrected with the date it changed.

Every university

• University of Bath costs
• University of Nottingham costs
• University of Birmingham costs
• University of Aberdeen costs
• University of Portsmouth costs
• Newcastle University costs
• University of Southampton costs
• University of Manchester costs
• University of Sussex costs
• University of Exeter costs
• University of Leeds costs
• Loughborough University costs
• University of Essex costs
• University of Kent costs
• University of Warwick costs
• Keele University costs
• University of Glasgow costs
• Cardiff University costs
• University of Strathclyde costs
• Royal Holloway, University of London costs
• University of Bristol costs
• University of Surrey costs
• Lancaster University costs
• University of Plymouth costs
• University of York costs
• University of Sheffield costs
• University College London costs
• Coventry University costs
• University of Reading costs
• Durham University costs
• Aston University costs
• Imperial College London costs
• Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) costs
• University of Liverpool costs
• University of East Anglia (UEA) costs
• King's College London (KCL) costs
• London School of Economics (LSE) costs

Rents checked 19 August 2026 from each university's own pricing pages; loans from GOV.UK. This is information, not financial advice.