Student Loan - Your obligations

You must tell us straight away if you drop a paper or withdraw from a course.

Withdrawing from a paper

If you drop a paper, you may not be studying full-time anymore and may not be able to continue borrowing for living costs or course-related costs. If you don’t tell us, you could be overpaid.

Withdrawing from a course

If you withdraw from your course you are still responsible for repaying your student loan.

You will need to ask your education provider if you qualify for a fee refund. Any refund will be paid directly to your loan account.

If you withdraw from your course and don't tell us, and your education provider tells us, we will suspend your loan.  That means any payments you were getting will stop.

Once you have studied 1.6 EFTS, you’ll need to pass at least half the workload of your previous study to get it again.  This is about 2 years of full-time study.

We assess your performance over a 5 year rolling assessment period that starts when you first get a student loan. This means that we will assess up to 5 years of your previous study, depending on when you first got a loan.

Your student loan contract is a formal agreement between you and the government, so it's important that you read and understand its terms and conditions.

You need to sign a student loan contract for every student loan you borrow.

If you’re 18 or over and you've had a student loan before, you can view and accept your new contract through your MyStudyLink account.

You must start making repayments towards your loan, even if you are still studying, if you earn more than $24,128 a year (or $464 a week) before tax. This is the repayment threshold.

Inland Revenue is responsible for collecting repayments from you.

When you start using your student loan, we start sending your loan information to Inland Revenue. We send this information every day.