Martin Lewis has shared a warning to students - past and present - who still have loans to repay.
The Money Saving Expert founder was reacting to the news that graduates from England and Wales who started university in or after 2012 will likely pay around £110 a year more than they would've done from April.
It comes amid plans to freeze the student loan repayment threshold – the earnings level at which loans begin to be repaid.
Michelle Donelan, the minister for higher and further Education, announced on Friday that the salary threshold for student loan repayments in England will be frozen at current levels of £27,295 per year, £2,274 a month, or £524 a week for 2022-23.
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Some experts said the freeze represents a real-terms £150 increase in the amount to be repaid each year.
Martin, who has consistently warned against retrospective changes to student loans, has explained the situation in his
latest Twitter thread and video.
While a "freeze" usually sounds like a good thing, Martin said what this really means, in reality, is that most graduates will actually end up worse off each year, the ECHO reports.
The current loan repayment threshold is £27,295 and those with student loans will repay nine percentof everything earned above that.
Next year, however, the threshold will go up to £28,550. This is a 4.6% increase.
Because the majority of people do not repay their student loans in full, paying 9% of anything above the threshold for 30 years, before any remaining debt is wiped, most graduates will be left worse off by the freeze.
An estimated 17% - the highest earners - repay their student loans in full.
So while the threshold is raised, these people will repay less.
Everybody else will lose out on an extra £110 each year, repaying much more than they would have done in total.
Martin said: "The highest-earning graduates will gain from this and the low to mid earners will pay more."
If implemented, the change represents a break with previous policy made by the Government in 2010 and agreed on by former Prime Minister Theresa May in 2017 that the threshold would be uprated annually "in line with the annual average earnings growth".
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