Financial health, 2024/25
| i | Trend5 years |
|---|
Also universities' audited financial statements, listed on the Data sources page · All data sources & licences
The financial health picture.
Four measures from each university's accounts, 2020/21 to 2024/25.
Drawn from HESA's finance data and the universities' audited accounts.
HESA FINANCE DATA AND THE UNIVERSITIES' LATEST ACCOUNTS2020/21–2024/25HESA tables May 2026 · accounts reviewed 27 September 2026 · Methodology v1.0
Illustrative assessment of published accounts. Not a credit rating, not regulatory, not a prediction. · Methodology v1.0, 27 September 2026. Each measure is rated on its own and there is no overall score. Read the disclaimer.
Loading the finance dataset…
UNIVERSITY DETAIL
Sector median: the middle value across all UK providers in HESA's finance data with complete inputs for that measure and year (n = number of providers), calculated by PBSAintel with the same definitions. Context, not a rating. See the methodology.
£m, financial years ending 31 July. Blank means not published. A dash means none reported. Staff costs and unrestricted reserves are context only and are not rated. HESA keeps each year as first reported, so a year can differ slightly from a later restatement in the accounts.
METHODOLOGY v1.0 · 27 SEPTEMBER 2026
How each question is measured.
1. Surplus or deficit? Surplus/(deficit) = surplus before other gains and losses, with pension provision movements removed (HESA Table 12, total changes to pension provisions, which includes schemes other than USS). Shown in £m and as a % of total income. Green ≥ 3%, Amber 0% to 3%, Red below 0%.
2. Is it one-off or structural? The same surplus/(deficit) before one-off costs: restructuring, severance and impairment. Surplus: no deficit this year. One-off: the deficit disappears before one-off costs; if there were also deficits before one-off costs in the two previous years, the label says so. Structural (N years): still in deficit before one-off costs, for N consecutive years. Recurring (N of 5 years): in deficit before one-off costs this year, not the year before, but in at least one earlier year of the five. First deficit: the only year of the five in deficit before one-off costs. A label, not a rating.
3. How much cash covers a deficit? Liquid funds (cash plus current asset investments) ÷ annual cash burn, where the cash burn is net operating cash outflow after adding investment income received. "Cash-positive" means operating cash, including investment income, was not negative. Runways above 50 years are shown as "near cash-neutral". Green if cash-positive or more than 10 years, Amber 3 to 10 years, Red under 3 years. Liquid funds can include money set aside for a purpose, such as Cardiff's Bond Repayment Fund; see the notes.
4. What does their debt look like? Debt ÷ income = borrowings (bank loans and external borrowing, funding council loans, finance leases, service concessions and overdrafts) ÷ total income: Green below 40%, Amber 40% to 75%, Red above 75%. Debt cover = operating cash including investment income received ÷ debt service (interest paid plus loan and lease capital repaid): Green ≥ 2x, Amber 1x to 2x, Red below 1x. When borrowings are under 10% of income the cover is shown as "Low debt" and not rated.
Sources and currency. HESA HE Provider Data: Finance (DT031) Tables 1, 3, 4 and 12, last updated May 2026, cover 2020/21 to 2024/25 and were checked against six universities' audited accounts. Where HESA has no row (Nottingham 2024/25) or does not show a one-off cost separately (for example Newcastle's 2024/25 severance), the figure comes from the university's own audited accounts, named in each detail panel. Universities publish 2025/26 accounts from about November 2026, before HESA includes them.
Sector medians. The two median rows under the table, and the "vs sector median" lines in each detail panel, apply the same definitions to HESA's finance data for every UK provider. Sector median uses every provider with complete inputs for that measure and year; 24-university median uses the 24 universities on this page. Each shows the number of providers behind it (n). A provider missing an input is left out of that median, never counted as zero. HESA's regional totals and the few providers that changed their year end within a year (two financial periods) are left out. Debt cover uses only providers that are rated: those with borrowings under 10% of income (Low debt) or no debt service paid are left out of the debt cover median but included in debt ÷ income. A cash-positive provider has no runway, so it ranks above any runway; when more than half are cash-positive the median is "Cash-positive". The medians use HESA figures only: HESA has no 2024/25 row for Nottingham, so its accounts-based 2024/25 figures in the table are not in the 2024/25 medians (23 of the 24), and the median before one-off costs removes HESA's restructuring line only, not the impairments and note-level restructuring we add from some universities' accounts. Each is a simple median of our own calculations, not a HESA or OfS figure, and is context, not a rating.
Alerts. Each detail panel reports two checks from the university's 2024/25 audited accounts, reviewed on 27 September 2026: whether the auditor reported a material uncertainty about going concern, and what the university says about its loan covenants (for example, complied with at the year end, or forecast to be met). Where the accounts say nothing about covenants, the panel says so; that does not mean there are none. These checks are not rated. A university whose accounts have not yet been reviewed is marked "Alerts: not yet reviewed".