Student life

Why is student accommodation so expensive?

Student rents are not rising for one simple reason. This guide uses economics to explain housing shortages, planning limits, university expansion and the business model behind PBSA.

By Business Bliss · 1 September 2026 · 26 min read

Student accommodation buildings — Image by Randy Jost from Pixabay

A student room can be a strange product. It may contain a narrow bed, a desk, a wardrobe and just enough floor space to open the wardrobe door, yet cost more than an entire flat did in the same city a generation ago. A room advertised at £210 a week sounds slightly less alarming than £10,710 for a 51-week contract, which is one reason accommodation is usually marketed by the week.

The obvious reaction is to compare the rent with the physical room. How can this small space possibly cost so much? Economically, however, the value of the furniture and floor area is only a small part of the answer. Rent is shaped by how many people need somewhere to live, how many suitable rooms exist, how quickly more can be created and what competing uses there are for the same buildings and land.

Student accommodation is therefore an unusually useful way to understand economics. It involves supply and demand, price elasticity, scarcity, planning restrictions, borrowing costs, local wages, market power, externalities and imperfect information. Unlike an abstract textbook market, it is also one that students encounter directly, often while trying to make a decision months before they know who their friends will be or how much money they will have.

Student demand can change in a single admissions cycle. Housing supply may take several years to respond.

The weekly figure conceals the real price

The first step is to turn the advertised weekly rent into a total cost. A £185 room on a 44-week university contract costs £8,140. The same weekly rent on a 51-week private contract costs £9,435. A room at £220 a week for 51 weeks costs £11,220, even if its occupant leaves in June and spends much of the summer elsewhere.

The contract length is not necessarily a hidden charge. A provider still owns, finances, insures, maintains and staffs the building during the summer, and some students genuinely need year-round accommodation. It does, however, mean that two rooms with similar weekly prices may have very different annual costs.

The scale of recent increases is clearer when rents are viewed over several years. A 2023 Unipol and Higher Education Policy Institute survey examined 125,913 rooms across ten university cities. The average annual rent rose from £6,520 in 2021/22 to £7,475 in 2023/24, an increase of 14.6 per cent in two years. The report calculated an average English student rent of £7,566, almost exactly the £7,590 average maintenance loan then expected to be taken up by full-time students.

London is a market of its own. The 2024 London Accommodation Costs Survey found that the average annual rent for a purpose-built student room had reached £13,595 in 2024/25. At that point, it was slightly higher than the maximum English maintenance loan available to a student living in London.

Maintenance support has risen since then. For 2026/27, the maximum loan for an eligible full-time undergraduate from England is £10,830 outside London and £14,135 in London. Many students receive substantially less because the loan is means-tested. Student finance also differs across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so no single figure describes the whole UK.

Supply and demand explain the pressure, but not in the way people sometimes think

"Supply and demand" is often used as a vague excuse for any high price. In student housing, the useful part of the theory is more precise.

Demand is not simply the number of students in a city. It is the number who want and can secure each kind of accommodation at different prices. It is affected by student numbers, maintenance support, parental contributions, wages from part-time work, international recruitment, commuting options and preferences for location, room type and privacy.

Supply is not simply the number of buildings with beds in them. It includes the particular rooms that are available at the right time, in a usable condition, within travelling distance of the relevant campus and at a price the student can pay. A £350-a-week studio does not solve a shortage of £150 rooms, even though it appears in the city's total bed count.

Why a small shortage can produce a large increase

Housing supply is highly inelastic in the short term. This means it cannot increase quickly when demand rises. If another 1,000 students need rooms in September, a city cannot manufacture 1,000 suitable rooms during August. A new block may require land assembly, design work, consultation, planning permission, finance, construction and safety approvals before anybody can move in.

Imagine a city with 10,000 students looking for accommodation and 9,800 reasonably affordable rooms. The numerical shortage is only two per cent. Its effect can nevertheless be severe because the 200 students without rooms still need somewhere to live. Some offer more for what remains, widen their search or accept rooms they would previously have rejected. Landlords and providers observe that rooms are filling quickly and raise prices for the next letting cycle.

The market price is set at the margin. A provider does not need every student in the city to consider a £240 room affordable. It needs enough students to fill the rooms it has. Students whose families can help, who have savings or who are able to borrow may therefore influence the price faced by students without those resources.

This does not mean wealthy students single-handedly cause high rents. It means that need and effective demand are different economic concepts. A student may urgently need a room but exert little influence over the market if they cannot pass an affordability check, find a guarantor or pay the required amount.

Shortage is local rather than national

There is no single UK student housing market. The 2023 ten-city survey recorded average annual rents of £9,200 in Bristol and £6,467 in Liverpool. Direct-let rents had increased particularly sharply in Bristol and Glasgow, where shortages were more severe, while Liverpool had experienced a more modest increase.

The position has also begun to soften in some places. In its 2025 results, major accommodation provider Unite reported 95.2 per cent occupancy and four per cent rental growth for 2025/26, down from 97.5 per cent occupancy and 8.2 per cent rental growth a year earlier. By July 2026, it was forecasting one to two per cent rental growth and 94 to 96 per cent occupancy for the following academic year.

Those figures do not prove that the accommodation problem has disappeared. They show that demand is changing and that some buildings, room types and university cities are stronger than others. A city can simultaneously have empty premium studios and an acute shortage of basic shared rooms.

Universities can expand much faster than cities can build

UK higher education expanded substantially before the recent slowdown. HESA recorded 2,383,970 higher education students in 2018/19. By 2024/25, the total stood at 2,863,180. The total fell by one per cent in each of the two latest years, but it remained roughly a fifth higher than in 2018/19.

Not all of those students require accommodation. The figure includes part-time students, commuters, distance learners and people living with family. Even so, the increase illustrates a fundamental timing problem. A university may be able to add places by using larger lectures, recruiting staff, extending teaching hours or altering its course mix. It cannot necessarily add hundreds of bedrooms at the same speed.

Universities also have different incentives from local housing authorities. Additional students generate tuition-fee income and may support courses, jobs and research. The accommodation costs created by expansion are spread across students, private landlords, developers, councils and neighbourhoods. Unless recruitment and housing plans are deliberately connected, one organisation can increase demand while another is left to manage the consequences.

International recruitment changes the type as well as the quantity of demand

International students are especially significant because they are less likely to have a family home within commuting distance and may need to arrange accommodation before reaching the UK. In 2024/25, there were 685,565 overseas students at UK higher education providers, representing 24 per cent of the total student population.

International student numbers had fallen by ten per cent from their 2022/23 peak, however. That reversal helps to explain why some providers entered the 2026 letting cycle with more cautious expectations. Buildings or cities that had come to depend heavily on rapid overseas recruitment could not assume that every previous growth trend would continue indefinitely.

The relevant question for a local housing market is therefore not merely whether UK student numbers are rising or falling. It is which university is changing its intake, on which campus, at what level of study, and whether those students are likely to need a room. A fall in one-year postgraduate recruitment may affect a different part of the market from an increase in first-year home undergraduates.

Students compete in the wider housing market

Student accommodation is often discussed as though every student lives in a hall or purpose-built block. In reality, students move between several connected markets:

university-owned or university-managed halls;
privately owned purpose-built student accommodation;
shared houses in multiple occupation, usually called HMOs;
ordinary flats and houses in the private rented sector;
lodgings and rooms in an owner's home;
living with family and commuting to campus.

These are substitute goods, although they are not perfect substitutes. If university halls are full, more first-year students enter the private market. If HMO numbers fall, returning students compete for purpose-built rooms and ordinary flats. If accommodation near campus becomes unaffordable, some students commute from a wider area, placing additional demand on transport and rental markets elsewhere.

This is why the general housing shortage cannot be separated from the student one. The ONS estimated that the average UK private rent reached £1,393 a month in July 2026, 3.7 per cent higher than a year earlier. That figure covers whole rented properties rather than individual student rooms, so it should not be used as a direct comparison. It does show the expensive background market in which many students and landlords are operating.

Local labour markets influence student rents

A university city with well-paid technology, financial, professional or medical employment attracts workers as well as students. Young professionals may compete with postgraduate students and groups of friends for flats and shared houses. Their salaries help support higher rents, which in turn raise the value of residential land.

This is one reason accommodation can be expensive even where the university itself has not recently grown. The competition may come from graduates who stayed after completing their degrees, workers moving into the city or employers expanding near the campus.

A strong local labour market can help students find part-time jobs, but it may also make housing more expensive. A weaker labour market may be associated with lower rents, yet leave students with fewer opportunities to supplement their maintenance income. Affordability depends on both sides of the calculation: the rent charged and the resources available to pay it.

Labour costs also affect supply. Student buildings require construction workers, electricians, plumbers, cleaners, maintenance teams, reception staff, security workers and accommodation managers. Where these workers are scarce or wages rise, the cost of building and operating accommodation increases.

It would still be misleading to say that every wage increase is simply "passed on" to tenants. A provider can only charge what the local market will bear. Higher costs affect whether a project is built, whether a landlord remains in the market and what minimum rent makes operating worthwhile. The actual rent is then determined through the interaction of those costs with demand and competition.

Planning restrictions create a genuine economic trade-off

It is easy to describe planning as unnecessary bureaucracy that prevents rooms from being built. It is equally easy to assume that any proposed student block should be opposed because it changes a neighbourhood. Both positions miss the economic problem planning is trying to manage.

Land close to a university is scarce and has competing uses. A site might become student rooms, family flats, affordable housing, offices, laboratories, shops, a hotel or public space. Choosing one use carries an opportunity cost: the value of the best alternative that can no longer be provided there.

Councils may also consider congestion, building height, heritage, daylight, pressure on services, waste, noise and the concentration of temporary residents. These effects are known as externalities because some costs or benefits fall on people other than the developer and tenants.

How HMO restrictions affect supply

In parts of England, an ordinary dwelling can usually change from the C3 use class to a small C4 HMO under permitted development rights. A local authority can use an Article 4 direction to remove that right in a defined area, meaning a planning application is required. Larger HMOs already fall outside the small C4 category. The rules and terminology vary elsewhere in the UK, so local policy must always be checked.

The purpose of an Article 4 direction is commonly to prevent harmful over-concentration and retain a mixture of households. A street dominated by student HMOs may have fewer permanent residents, seasonal occupancy and increased pressure on parking or waste services. Requiring permission allows the council to consider those effects.

The economic consequence is that converting another family house becomes slower, riskier and more expensive. Some proposed HMOs will be refused and others will never be attempted. If student demand remains unchanged, restricting this route can increase competition for the HMOs already operating and push more students towards purpose-built accommodation.

This does not prove that Article 4 directions are wrong. It shows that protecting family housing and neighbourhood balance has a price. A serious policy assessment should identify who receives the benefit, who bears the cost and whether replacement student rooms are being enabled elsewhere.

Purpose-built developments face their own restrictions

A purpose-built student accommodation scheme may need to satisfy policies covering location, design, room standards, communal space, cycle storage, accessibility, affordable rooms and the effect on the surrounding area. The London purpose-built student accommodation guidance, for example, attempts to balance the need for student rooms with affordable provision, conventional housing and mixed neighbourhoods.

These requirements can create public value, but they can also change whether a scheme is financially viable. A larger room costs more to build. A requirement for affordable rooms reduces the income generated by part of the building. A lower permitted height spreads the land cost across fewer tenants. Planning delay adds professional fees and interest while the site produces no rental income.

The effect is not necessarily that developers simply add every cost to the rent. A developer may instead reduce what it offers for the land, redesign the scheme, seek different finance, delay construction or abandon the project. Where landowners are unwilling to accept a lower price, an approved site can remain unbuilt.

Planning permission is not the same as a new room

Accommodation pipelines often sound impressive because they include every scheme at several stages of development. A room described as "in the pipeline" may be under construction, have full permission, have only an outline proposal or still be subject to funding and legal agreements.

Knight Frank reported that 19,600 purpose-built student beds were delivered across the UK in 2025. That was an increase on 2024 but remained below the five-year pre-pandemic annual average of more than 25,000. A further 50,250 beds were under construction, heavily concentrated in London, Bristol, Glasgow, Coventry and Manchester.

The geographical concentration is important. A new room in Coventry cannot meet a shortage in York. Even within one city, a building on the wrong side of a difficult journey may not be an effective substitute for accommodation near a particular campus.

The type of room matters too. A development of expensive studios increases the official bed count but may do little for students looking for basic rooms in shared flats. Housing supply should therefore be examined by location, price and room type rather than as one national total.

Why purpose-built student accommodation is not automatically cheap

Purpose-built student accommodation, usually shortened to PBSA, can house many people on a relatively small site. In principle, that density should create economies of scale. The cost of land, reception staff, security systems and communal facilities can be spread across hundreds of tenants.

In practice, PBSA also has substantial development and operating costs:

land in locations with good access to campuses;
construction, demolition and professional fees;
multiple bathrooms, kitchens, lifts and utility connections;
fire, access and building-safety requirements;
interest and other financing costs during development;
planning obligations and infrastructure contributions;
reception, management, cleaning and security staff;
electricity, heating, water and broadband where bills are included;
insurance, maintenance and regular refurbishment;
marketing, booking systems, vacancies and unpaid rent.

Adding a gym, cinema room or roof terrace is not necessarily the main reason a building is expensive, although such features can position it in a premium market. The basic structure may already be costly because it contains hundreds of separately serviced rooms on expensive land.

A simplified PBSA development calculation

Suppose a proposed building has 300 rooms charging £190 a week on 51-week contracts. At 97 per cent occupancy, its gross annual rent would be approximately £2.82 million.

Now assume, purely to illustrate the calculation, that operating costs consume 35 per cent of that income. The building would produce net operating income of about £1.83 million. Property investors often value an income-producing building by dividing its net income by a required yield.

At a five per cent yield, £1.83 million of annual net income suggests a capital value of roughly £36.7 million. At a six per cent yield, the same income supports a value of only about £30.5 million. Nothing about the rooms has physically changed, but the value has fallen by more than £6 million because investors now require a higher return.

This is a deliberately simplified example. A real appraisal would account for rental growth, taxes, transaction costs, debt terms, development risk, lease arrangements and many other factors. It nevertheless explains why interest rates and investor expectations can decide whether a block proceeds.

If the completed building is expected to be worth £30.5 million but the land, construction and financing costs total £35 million, the developer will not normally build it. The possible responses are to secure cheaper land, reduce costs, obtain a subsidy, wait for financial conditions to improve or increase the projected rent. The last option only works if enough students will actually pay it.

Interest rates affect both new buildings and old shared houses

Bank Rate was 0.1 per cent at the beginning of December 2021. It rose to 5.25 per cent in August 2023 and, after several reductions, stood at 3.75 per cent in July 2026. Although below its peak, borrowing remained far more expensive than during the near-zero-rate period.

For a PBSA developer, higher interest rates increase the cost of buying land and financing construction before any tenants arrive. They may also increase the return expected by investors who can now obtain better yields from less complicated investments.

For a private HMO landlord, the effect is different but related. A fixed-rate mortgage may eventually need refinancing at a substantially higher rate. Some landlords absorb the increase. Others raise rents where demand permits, reduce investment, sell the property or return it to family use. When landlords leave and the property is not retained as student housing, supply contracts.

It is important not to say that a landlord's mortgage determines the rent. Two identical houses on the same street will tend to command similar rents even if one owner has no mortgage and the other has borrowed heavily. The market does not reimburse each landlord's personal costs.

Borrowing costs still matter because they influence landlords' decisions to enter, remain in or leave the market. In economic terms, they alter the supply curve rather than creating a pound-for-pound entitlement to higher rent.

PBSA is also an investment product

To a student, a building is a place to sleep and study. To a university, it may be part of the student experience and recruitment offer. To a pension fund, property company or investment manager, it is an asset expected to generate income.

Those descriptions are not mutually exclusive. Investment can finance rooms that would otherwise never be built. The difficulty is that an investor-backed development must compete for capital with offices, warehouses, government bonds, data centres and other opportunities. It needs to offer an acceptable return for its perceived risk.

Nomination agreements can make the income more predictable. Under these arrangements, a university reserves or guarantees access to a block of rooms, reducing the risk that the building will be left partly empty. Unite reported in July 2026 that 51 per cent of the rooms in one newly completed London building were supported by a long-term nomination agreement with University of the Arts London.

Predictable occupancy can reduce risk and support development. It may also reduce the direct competitive pressure on a provider if a large share of its rooms is effectively secured through an institutional relationship. The detail of the agreement, including who bears vacancy risk and how rents are reviewed, therefore matters.

Why new rooms are often the most expensive

The cost of a new building is based on current land, labour, materials, finance and regulatory requirements. An older hall may have been built when all of those were cheaper, and its original debt may already have been repaid. The 2023 Unipol and HEPI report found that newly added beds were 22 per cent more expensive than existing stock.

This creates an awkward result. A city needs new supply to reduce scarcity, yet the supply that can be delivered commercially may begin at the upper end of the market. Over time, new accommodation can still relieve pressure by allowing students with larger budgets to leave older stock to others. Economists sometimes call this process filtering. It is slow, imperfect and unlikely to help if older rooms are demolished, refurbished into premium units or removed from the market at the same time.

Why students are asked to choose houses absurdly early

Student housing has an unusual annual cycle. Large numbers of tenancies begin within a few weeks of one another, and many tenants leave at almost the same time. A room left empty in October cannot always be filled as easily as an ordinary flat that appeals to tenants throughout the year.

Providers try to reduce this risk by opening bookings early. Students respond by booking early because they fear the best-value rooms will disappear. Landlords then point to early demand as evidence that they should advertise even earlier. The result can become self-reinforcing.

In a 2025 Unipol student survey, 56 per cent of respondents said being pushed to choose accommodation in October or November was far too early. Almost two-thirds reported struggling to find anything within budget, and students said they were paying an average of £36 a week more than they had planned.

The pressure is not only financial. A first-year student may be asked to sign a joint contract with people they met a few weeks earlier. They may not yet know whether they will remain on the course, study abroad, undertake a placement or prefer to live with a different group.

Economically, this is a market with substantial search costs and imperfect information. Students cannot inspect every property, accurately predict future friendships or easily move to another city. Contracts, guarantor requirements and academic timetables make switching costly. This weakens the idea that every tenant is making a calm, fully informed choice between dozens of equivalent products.

Scarcity can coexist with market power

Many traditional student houses are owned by individual landlords, which makes that part of the market relatively fragmented. Purpose-built accommodation is different. A student searching within walking distance of one campus may find that a small number of providers control much of the suitable stock.

The rooms are also differentiated. One provider offers studios, another inexpensive shared bathrooms, and another a university nomination agreement. Distance, safety, accessibility and contract length mean that rooms with beds and desks are not necessarily close substitutes.

This resembles monopolistic competition: several providers may operate, but each has some pricing power because its location and product are not identical to anybody else's. A provider beside a campus does not have to match the rent of a cheaper building reached by two buses.

Market power is constrained by vacancies. A room earns nothing while empty, and providers may cut prices, offer cashback or shorten contracts when bookings are weak. The softer 2026 leasing figures show this mechanism operating in some locations. Competition works more strongly where students have credible alternatives and less strongly where nearly every suitable room is taken.

Why "just build more" is correct but incomplete

Increasing supply is the clearest long-term way to reduce scarcity. If more suitable rooms become available while demand remains stable, students have more alternatives and providers find it harder to raise rents without losing tenants.

The word suitable carries much of the argument. New supply needs to be in the right city, accessible to the relevant campuses and available at prices students can meet. A thousand premium studios do not have the same effect as a thousand mixed-price rooms, and a development completed after a shortage has moved elsewhere may struggle to fill.

More PBSA can also affect the wider housing market. Students who move into purpose-built rooms no longer compete for some HMOs and ordinary flats. Those properties may become available to families and workers, relieving pressure beyond the student sector. This release is not automatic: a former student house may be sold, substantially renovated or remain in the same market.

There is also a moving-target problem. If a university sees that more rooms are being built and expands recruitment by a similar amount, the demand curve shifts out again. Housing policy and admissions strategy need to be considered together rather than assuming the city will always catch up later.

What the problem looks like in economic language

Student housing is not one simple market failure. It combines several ideas:

Scarcity: desirable land and affordable rooms are limited.
Inelastic supply: the number of rooms changes slowly in response to higher rents.
Demand shocks: university recruitment and migration patterns can change quickly.
Externalities: new development and HMO concentration affect surrounding communities.
Opportunity cost: land used for student rooms cannot simultaneously provide family housing or another use.
Credit constraints: students without savings, guarantors or family support have fewer effective choices.
Imperfect information: students sign early with limited knowledge of properties, costs and future circumstances.
Market power: location and differentiated accommodation give some providers control over price.
Distributional effects: the same rent increase causes much greater harm to a low-income student than to somebody with substantial family support.

This is also why a simple diagram rarely completes an economics essay. Students analysing housing markets must decide which supply curve is relevant, distinguish the short run from the long run and consider who ultimately bears the cost of a policy. Specialist economics assignment help can be useful when working through elasticity, development finance, externalities, market failure and policy evaluation, particularly where real housing evidence does not fit neatly into one textbook model.

How to investigate the market in your university city

A national average will not tell you whether your own university has enough rooms. A more useful investigation can be carried out with publicly available information.

Check student numbers over several years. Use HESA data to examine the relevant university rather than the UK total. Separate full-time from part-time students and look for changes in international, postgraduate and first-year recruitment.
Find out where teaching occurs. A university may operate several campuses. Growth at a suburban campus creates different housing demand from growth in the city centre.
Count operational beds separately from proposed ones. University annual reports, accommodation pages and council evidence studies may identify existing halls. Planning portals show proposed developments, but permission should not be counted as a completed room.
Read the local planning policy. Look for PBSA guidance, Article 4 directions, HMO concentration limits and affordable student accommodation requirements.
Compare annual rather than weekly rents. Multiply the weekly price by the contract length and note whether electricity, heating, water, broadband, laundry and transport are included.
Separate room types. Calculate typical prices for shared bathrooms, en-suite cluster rooms and studios rather than treating them as one product.
Examine the wider rental market. ONS local rent data and current property listings can reveal the pressure from workers, families and other tenants.
Look for signs of genuine scarcity. Rapid sell-outs, waiting lists and rising direct-let rents suggest excess demand. Persistent discounts, cashback and unfilled rooms suggest a softer segment of the market.
Compare rent with realistic student income. Use the maintenance loan actually available at different household incomes, not only the maximum headline figure. Add likely earnings and bursaries cautiously rather than assuming a student can work unlimited hours.

This process may reveal that a city does not have one accommodation problem. It might have enough rooms overall but too few inexpensive ones, enough city-centre beds but too few near an outlying campus, or a surplus of studios alongside a shortage of shared houses.

What could genuinely make student accommodation cheaper?

No single policy can quickly undo a shortage created over many years. Several changes could improve the position, although each involves trade-offs.

Connect university recruitment with housing capacity

Universities could publish clearer accommodation plans alongside significant expansion. This does not mean every institution must house every student, but councils and developers need credible forecasts of where demand will arise. Recruitment decisions made without reference to local capacity leave students carrying the adjustment through higher rents and longer journeys.

Make planning more predictable

Faster decisions and clear local rules can reduce the risk premium built into development. Predictability does not require abandoning room standards, affordable housing or community safeguards. A developer is often better able to price a demanding but clear policy than an uncertain process that takes years and may produce an unexpected refusal.

Retain safe, affordable shared housing

HMOs are unpopular in some neighbourhoods, but they remain one of the cheaper forms of accommodation for many returning students. Councils need to distinguish between enforcing safety and management standards and allowing the affordable end of the market to disappear entirely.

Where HMO growth is restricted, planning for replacement student rooms becomes particularly important. Otherwise a policy intended to protect family housing may simply intensify competition for the remaining shared houses.

Build a wider range of PBSA rooms

Cluster flats, non-en-suite rooms and differently sized bedrooms can serve students who do not want or cannot afford studios. A building containing several price points may also use higher rents from premium rooms to support more basic options, although the scale of any cross-subsidy should be transparent rather than assumed.

Use lower-cost, long-term finance

Universities, public bodies and long-term investors may be able to accept lower returns than a highly leveraged speculative development. Lower financing costs can make affordable rents more viable, provided the saving is reflected in the prices charged rather than absorbed elsewhere.

Expand the effective market through transport

Reliable and inexpensive buses, cycling routes and late-evening transport allow students to consider cheaper areas farther from campus. This does not create buildings, but it turns some existing housing into a more realistic substitute. A distant room with a costly or unreliable journey is not genuinely affordable.

Increase maintenance support alongside supply

Students may need more support simply to participate in university life. However, economics provides an important warning. When housing supply is fixed in the short term, a broad increase in tenants' ability to pay can partly feed into higher rents. Landlords know that more money is available and competition for the same rooms remains intense.

This is not an argument against adequate maintenance support. Leaving students without enough money for food is not a housing policy. It is an argument for combining financial support with measures that increase affordable supply, so the benefit is not gradually captured through rent.

The price is the result of several systems colliding

Student accommodation is expensive because demand is concentrated, supply is slow, land has competing uses and both small landlords and large developers face higher costs of finance and operation. University expansion can add demand before housing is ready, while planning must balance the need for rooms against the effects of development on everyone else.

None of this means every rent is fair or every provider is merely covering costs. Scarcity gives owners pricing power, and some will charge as much as the market permits. Nor does it mean every city is in permanent crisis. Falling international recruitment, changing student preferences or a wave of new construction can produce empty rooms and discounts in particular locations.

The most damaging feature is distributional. Higher rents do not merely make university less comfortable. They make access more dependent on family income, savings and the ability to work alongside a course. Two students can receive the same offer from the same university but face very different chances of accepting it because one can absorb an £11,000 rent and the other cannot.

The question is therefore larger than why one small room costs so much. It is whether university cities are expanding in a way that provides enough places for students to live, and whether the available places are being built for the students who actually need them rather than only for those who can pay the highest price.

Sources and further reading

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