Annual funding

The Office for Students distributes government higher education funding to more than 300 providers in England.

Our funding grants do not meet the entire teaching costs of a course. Providers receive most of this cost through student tuition fees. Instead, our funding is focused to support:

• areas where teaching costs are particularly high (such as medicine)
• particular policy areas that the government wants us to prioritise (such as promoting equal opportunities).

We allocate funds by academic year (August to July).

Who we can fund

For 2018-19, we’re providing funding under powers that formerly applied to HEFCE.

This means we can only fund teaching at certain higher education institutions (broadly, this means universities) and specific courses at further education and sixth form colleges.

From 2019-20, our conditions of funding will reflect the new regulatory framework, as it comes into effect.

What we base our calculations on

We receive a guidance letter from the government every spring. This sets out our teaching funding budget, along with policy areas we should prioritise and any conditions of funding we should apply.

Our board then meets in March to decide the methods we can use to calculate funding for the upcoming year.

Funding allocations for 2018-19

We will release our allocations for 2018-19 in early May 2018. This page will be updated with:

• detailed information on how we have calculated our funding
• allocations for all institutions we fund.

The OfS board met on 26 March and agreed the methods that we will be using to calculate our funding. We have now summarised their decisions.

Research funding

We do not provide any annual funding to support research. HEFCE did provide such funding, but this is now distributed by UK Research and Innovation, through Research England.

Previous annual funding

For further information on how funding has been allocated in the past, you can consult the Annual allocations pages on the HEFCE website.

These pages provide links to funding provided by HEFCE in the academic years up to 2017-18, along with supporting documents and publications.