The UK grants about five in six student visa applications from Nepal. That is by some distance the best rate of the five countries we work in, and it is the single most useful fact about British study that nobody puts on a signboard.
The grant rate did fall, from 98 to 84 percent, in a year. It is still the best of the five, and the reason is structural: the UK decides on paperwork, not on an interview. Australia refuses on a Genuine Student statement. America refuses in a three-minute conversation at a window. The UK reads your file.
That means a careful file is genuinely rewarded here in a way it is not everywhere.
The money
Two amounts, and they are separate.
Maintenance. Outside London, £1,171 a month for nine months: £10,539. In London, £1,529 a month: £13,761. Both rise on 30 November 2026, to £1,203 and £1,570 a month.
Tuition. Whatever is not already paid. If you have paid a deposit, the receipt reduces what you have to show.
At Nepal Rastra Bank's rate that maintenance figure is a little over 21 lakh for a course outside London. Our cost page works the whole thing out including the charges people forget.
The 28 days, which is where files fail
The maintenance money must sit in the account for 28 consecutive days, and the closing balance of that 28-day period has to be dated no more than 31 days before you apply.
The part that catches people: if the balance dips below the required amount on any single day inside that window, the 28 days start again. Not the day it dips. The whole period.
So the practical advice is boring and it works. Move the money in, and then do not touch that account at all. Not for the IELTS fee, not for the application fee, not for anything.
The health surcharge, paid in one go
The Immigration Health Surcharge is £776 a year, and it is paid upfront for the entire course before the visa is issued. On a two-year master's that is £1,552 in a single payment, more than a lakh and a half in rupees, weeks before you fly.
It buys you the NHS on the same terms as a British resident, which is genuinely worth having. It is simply not something most families have budgeted for.
What working actually pays
Twenty hours a week during term for degree-level study, full time in vacations.
The National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for age 21 and over from April 2026, £10.85 for 18 to 20. Twenty hours at the higher rate is about £1,100 a month before tax.
Outside London that covers rent and food and very little else. In London it does not cover rent. Nobody funds a UK degree on twenty hours a week, and the visa does not expect you to. Work is a cushion, not a plan.
The jobs Nepali students actually get in the first six months are warehouse and order picking, care work once the DBS check clears, supermarket nights, kitchen work and cleaning. Care pays best of those and is worth the paperwork.
Afterwards
The Graduate Route gives you 18 months after a master's, three years after a doctorate, with no job offer required.
Those 18 months are the whole game. To stay beyond them you need a sponsoring employer on a Skilled Worker visa, and then five years on it to settle. Care, health, IT and engineering sponsor readily and people from Nepal move through those routes every year. Outside them it is harder.
So the lever is the course. Choose one that leads somewhere sponsors are actually hiring, and start applying in term one rather than after graduation.
There is a proposal to extend settlement from five years to ten. It is not law, and we will change this page if it becomes law.
Where the Nepalis are
Around 107,000, and unusually for this list it is an old, settled community rather than a student one, built largely on Gurkha families. Reading, Basingstoke, Swindon and Aldershot in the south. Hounslow, Hillingdon, Ealing and Woolwich in London. The West Midlands.
In practice that means functioning temples, shops that stock what you cook with, and a rental network that will take you without a UK guarantor. That last one saves more trouble than anything else on this page.
One more thing worth knowing
A UK master's is genuinely one year. You arrive in September and are writing a dissertation by June. That is less time to settle and build a case for staying than Canada or Australia give you, and it is also a year less tuition and a year less rent, which is why the UK often works out cheapest of the five overall.