Currently about 16.5k tax free. If you live in London you get slightly more, and if you're an STFC-CASE student you get more again (total of around 20k in Londo

Currently about 16.5k tax free. If you live in London you get slightly more, and if you're an STFC-CASE student you get more again (total of around 20k in London). It equates to somewhere between 19-22k if you were paying income tax. For anywhere outside London and Oxford/Cambridge (where rents are also extremely inflated) it's a fairly liveable wage. Shared housing pretty much anywhere else is in the range of 500 a month, possibly a bit less in the North of England. UK citizens generally don't have to pay tuition fees directly, they're all rolled into the PhD "grant".