About Postgraduate

To apply, you must:

• Be a UK / EU national or a family member of one;
• An EU applicant must be ordinarily resident in the UK or elsewhere in the EEA and/or Switzerland for the 3 years immediately before the 1st September of the year in which you start your course (you can ignore any short absences, such as holidays).
• Non-UK nationals must have settled status on the first day of the first academic year of the course – which could be 1 September, 1 January, 1 April or 1 July.
• International students can also apply if they have been resident in the EU for the last 3 years or have been a resident in the UK for the 5 years prior to the start of their course, with an immigration status that allows them to stay in the UK, with no restrictions.

You may also be eligible if you:

• Are a refugee;
• Have humanitarian protection (as a result of a failed application for asylum);
• Are a migrant worker;
• Are the child of a Swiss national or Turkish worker who is working in the UK;

• under humanitarian protection or a relative of someone who has been granted it;
• not a UK national but you’ve lived in the UK for at least 20 years (or at least half of your life);
• a serving member of the UK armed forces (or their spouse or civil partner or a dependent parent living with them);

Having a loan from a previous undergraduate course won’t affect your eligibility for a Postgraduate Loan. You can only get a Postgraduate Loan if you don’t already have a postgraduate Master’s qualification or a higher-level qualification like a PhD. If you take a Postgraduate Loan for a course but don’t complete it you won’t be able to get a second Postgraduate Loan.

The course you’re studying must be in the UK and lead to a Master’s qualification such as:

• Master of Science (MSc)
• Master of Art (MA)
• Master of Philosophy (MPhil)
• Master of Research (MRes)
• Master of Law (LLM)
• Master of Letters (MLitt)
• Master of Fine Art (MFA)
• Master of Education (MEd)
• Master of Business Administration (MBA)

You can’t get a Postgraduate Loan for postgraduate level courses, such as PgCert (Postgraduate Certificate), PgDip (Postgraduate Diploma) or where the postgraduate course is funded by undergraduate student finance, such as:

• Initial Teacher Training (ITT)/ Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE);
• Integrated Master’s;
• Master of Architecture (MArch);

The university you’re studying at must be in the UK and either:

• publicly funded (paid for by the government); or
• privately funded but running individual courses that receive public funding;