Interest on student loans remains virtually the same

It was already possible to calculate the interest on student loans last week, but now student financing agency DUO has confirmed that it will remain approximately the same in 2025 as it is now. 

But even if it is only a hundredth, the interest has still increased for the third year in a row, says Mylou Miché, chair of the National Student Association (ISO). "It may seem like a small increase, but the consequences for students’ wallets are major. Not only is the interest rate on our loans increasing, but so is our financial stress.” 

The National Student Union reacted to the news in a similar fashion. “More and more students are telling us they can no longer make ends meet,” says chair Abdelkader Karbache. “Some of them cannot afford a higher education degree without borrowing some money. Soon, this interest will leave them stuck with debts that cannot be repaid after their studies.”

35 years or 15 years
Since the loan system was introduced in 2015, students have been given 35 years to repay their loans. If the interest rate were to remain the same for all that time, students would pay 5.90 euros in interest for every tenner they borrow.

Anyone who started studying before 2015 falls under the old system of student finance. These people have to repay in fifteen years. The interest is calculated slightly differently for them. So, for them, interest has fallen from 2.95 percent to 2.21 percent.

The difference is that the rate in the old system was linked to the interest on government loans in September. Now that is the average interest rate over an entire year. The latter system was introduced to protect students against extreme interest rate fluctuations.

Some 200,000 repayers will receive a new interest rate for the next five years, says DUO. At the moment, approximately 265,000 former students pay off their student debt in 35 years. Approximately 930,000 former students do so in fifteen years.