Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of the international student levy on university incomes.

The International Student Levy will require higher education (HE) providers to pay a flat fee of £925 per international student per year. An impact analysis of the levy published in November 2025 estimated the income losses to the HE sector from the levy in isolation to be £270 million in its first year. The full impact analysis is available here: https://consult.education.gov.uk/international-student-levy-unit/international-student-levy/supporting_documents/international-student-levy-impact-analysispdf.

HE providers are independent from government and as such are responsible for managing their own finances. The department has announced increases to tuition fee limits in line with forecast inflation for the 2025/26, 2026/27, and 2027/28 academic years. We will also legislate, when parliamentary time allows, to increase tuition fee caps automatically for future academic years.

Over the next five years, tuition fee limit uplifts could generate an additional £6 billion for HE providers, significantly outweighing the currently projected less than £1 billion cost of the levy. This approach ensures the sector benefits from compounding annual increases, delivering growing resources to support quality education and innovation.