The UK money rule that refuses applications: 28 consecutive days
The UK does not ask for a lump sum the way Canada's GIC does. It asks for a monthly figure held for 28 consecutive days, and the 28 days is what applications actually fail on. Here is exactly how it works and where people get caught.
The short answer
£1,334 a month for a London campus, £1,023 a month outside it, held for 28 consecutive days.
The amount is the easy part. The 28 days is what applications fail on, and it is the part almost nobody plans for.
The UK is not Canada, and this is where it matters
If you have researched Canada first, you will have met the GIC: a lump sum paid to a bank, which releases it back to you in instalments. It is a product you buy. Once bought, the money question is settled.
The UK has nothing like it. There is no product to purchase and no certificate to obtain. UKVI looks at a real bank balance, held over a real period of time, and asks whether it stayed above the line for the whole of it.
That difference decides how you prepare. A GIC can be arranged in days. A 28-day balance cannot be arranged in fewer than 28 days, by definition — so the money question has to start a month before you would otherwise think about it.
What you have to show
| Campus location | Per month | For 9 months |
|---|---|---|
| London | £1,334 | £12,006 |
| Outside London | £1,023 | £9,207 |
Plus any tuition you have not already paid.
Which figure applies is decided by where your campus is, not where you plan to live. A student at a London campus who intends to commute in from Reading is on the London figure. Getting that wrong leaves you £2,799 short of a requirement you thought you had met.
The 28-day rule, precisely
Three conditions, and all three have to hold:
- The full amount is in the account for 28 consecutive days
- The balance never dips below that total at any point inside the window
- The 28-day period ends no more than 31 days before you apply
The second one is what refuses applications.
How people fail it without noticing
The balance does not have to fall far. It has to fall at all, for a single day, on a statement somebody reads later.
- A standing order for rent leaves on the 3rd
- A card payment clears two days later than expected
- A parent transfers money in, then moves some back out "just for a week"
- A fee is debited on the same day interest is credited
Any one of those resets the clock to day one. The application is not weakened — it fails that requirement, and the 28 days starts again.
The practical protection is boring and it works: use an account with nothing else moving through it. Not your everyday account. A separate account where the only event in 28 days is the deposit arriving.
The two costs people leave out of the budget
The maintenance figure is not the whole bill.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Student visa application, from outside the UK | £524 |
| Immigration Health Surcharge, per year of visa | £776 |
The health surcharge is the one that surprises people. It is charged per year of the visa, upfront, in a single payment. A three-year undergraduate visa is £2,328 paid before you travel, not £776.
Your CAS comes first
None of the above is worth anything until you have a CAS — the Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies your university issues once you have accepted an offer and met its conditions. The route is a Student Visa through UKVI, and the CAS is what the visa application is built on.
The order is: offer, then accept and meet the conditions, then CAS, then the visa application. A typical decision takes around three weeks from there.
Running the money and the CAS in parallel is sensible, and it is where the timing goes wrong. The 28 days has to finish before you apply, and finish no more than 31 days before it. Starting the clock too early fails exactly as surely as starting it too late.
A timeline that works
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Day 0 | Money into a clean, separate account |
| Days 1–28 | Nothing moves. No payments in, none out. |
| Day 28 | The 28-day statement is available |
| Days 28–59 | Apply — the window is 31 days from the end date |
| + about 3 weeks | Typical UKVI decision |
Before you rely on any of this
Every figure above was checked against the official guidance on 17 August 2026: £1,334 and £1,023 a month, the £524 application fee and the £776 annual health surcharge.
Fees and thresholds change, sometimes with little notice, and the amount you need is the amount on the day you apply. Confirm each figure on the UK government's own Student visa pages before you move any money, and ask your counsellor to check it with you.
Nobody can promise you a visa. The decision belongs to UKVI. What you can do is make sure the money question is not the reason it goes wrong.
Getting it right the first time
The UK financial requirement is not difficult. It is unforgiving about timing, and the timing is the part students discover too late — usually 28 days too late.
UniStep places students into UK universities and checks the money question before an application goes anywhere near UKVI. Tell us your campus city and your intake, and we will tell you the exact figure and the exact window.