I'd reckon £40-50 a week for food and "entertainment", allowing £30-40 for food and drink at home, and £10-20 for going out. Plus £5-10 a week for clothes, etc, and some kind of single lump-sum for books (maybe £30 per semester, depending on your course and on whether the uni has a second-hand bookshop for course-books). This gives a decent standard of living and a reasonable social life. Some ppl will spend more on beer and parties - so be it, but they'll have to deal with supplying that money themselves!

I don't think you shouldn't be paying all of that though -they should typically be using the student overdraft to cover it until the summer and then get a job to pay it off. Maybe reckon on paying £30-£40 a week, and let them cover the rest from the summer job. And don't forget that even if they're home, the going-out and clothes budgets are still there, so covering maybe half of that during Xmas and Easter vacs would be about right. If you want to give them more (maybe they're going on Operation Raleigh or something and so can't work over the summer, and you don't want them to be short of cash) then so be it, but it's your choice, not theirs! :-)

If they're in halls, of course, food is likely already paid for, so it's just the social, clothes and books budgets to consider.

(Ex-student at Lufbra, 1992-1997)

But you can likely add another 50% to all those for unis in towns within 2 hours of London (Cambridge, Reading, etc) and double it for London. At least for the going-out and clothing budgets, anyway.

Graham.