With maintenance loans falling hundreds of pounds short and rents still rising, students across the region are finding new ways to make ends meet

The cost of living has been headline news for a couple of years now, but for students in the North West it’s less of a news story and more of a monthly reality check.

According to the Office for National Statistics, 88% of UK adults say the cost of living is a major concern, and nearly two-thirds say their expenses are still going up. In a region where rents have risen faster than wages for years, that’s not an abstract statistic, it’s the difference between making rent and not.

Students are feeling it most sharply. Research from Save the Student puts average monthly student spending at £1,142. The average maintenance loan doesn’t come close, falling short by more than £500 a month. That’s not a rounding error. It’s food, bills, and bus fare.

So people are working. Two-thirds of students now take on paid work to cover basic living costs, according to research highlighted by The Access Project. The problem is that a Saturday shift in a café or a few evenings in a bar doesn’t always fit around a full timetable, and increasingly, students are looking for something that does.

The shift to earning on your phone

Around one in three UK workers now earn money outside their main job, and among younger people that number is growing. What’s changed in recent years isn’t just how many people are doing it, but how.

Surveys, app testing, paid research studies, reselling – these aren’t career moves, and nobody’s pretending they are. But they’re things you can do in twenty minutes between lectures or on the train home, without committing to a rota or a manager. For someone already juggling a degree and a tight budget, that flexibility matters more than the hourly rate.

It’s less about ambition and more about practicality. The “side hustle” has quietly stopped being an aspirational concept and started being something a lot of people just do to get by.

A new wave of platforms is emerging

A wave of platforms has grown up around this shift. One such app, Prograd, pulls together hundreds of these online earning opportunities into one place, so students aren’t spending time trawling across different apps and websites to find something worth doing.

“We’re seeing more young people turning to flexible ways of earning because they simply need options that fit around their lives,” says a Prograd spokesperson. “Not everyone can commit to fixed hours, especially students. What they want is something they can pick up and put down when it suits them, and that’s exactly where online earning is stepping in.”

The platform is aimed squarely at the gap between what loans cover and what living actually costs – which, for most students right now, is a significant one.

Not a fix, but part of how people are coping

None of this solves the underlying problem. Rents are still too high, loans are still too low, and a few quid from a survey isn’t going to change that.

But for students and young people across the North West, flexible online earning has stopped being a novelty and started being part of how people actually manage. The question most are asking isn’t whether they need extra income, it’s where the most practical place to find it is.