Loading Work and Study Balance…
Friends, exercise, doing nothing. Whatever you refuse to sell.
A visa condition, a contract, a scholarship rule. Leave it blank if none does.
33 h
Out of 53 h not already committed, 20 h of it kept free.
No legal limit is built into this tool, because there is no single one to build in. Caps on paid work for students are real and common — student visa conditions, scholarship and bursary terms, term-time rules, and employment law for under-18s all impose them — but they differ by country, by immigration status, by institution and between term and vacation, and they change. If one applies to you, it is on your visa, your contract or your funding letter, and it goes in the field above.
A week is 168 hours whatever anyone wants, so every hour of paid work comes out of a line you have already written down. The private study figure is the one to be honest about: it is what you intend to do, not what your timetable formally requires, and a plan that quietly borrows from it is the usual way a term goes wrong.
Every plan that combines studying with a paid job founders on the same fact: the week is a fixed quantity. Sleep, timetabled classes, private study, travel, eating and everything already promised to somebody else all come out of the same 168 hours, and paid work can only occupy what survives. Written down, the remainder is usually smaller than the number people had in mind, and it is a great deal easier to argue with in advance than in November.
So the tool subtracts rather than advises. You list what your week already contains, including the hours you refuse to sell, and what is left is the honest ceiling on paid work. If that figure is uncomfortable, the useful response is to change a line above it rather than to hope the arithmetic is wrong.
Limits on how much a student may work are real and common. Student visa conditions carry them in a number of countries, often with different figures for term time and vacation. Scholarship and bursary terms sometimes carry them. Employment law restricts the hours of workers under eighteen almost everywhere, and some institutions attach their own expectations to a place on a course.
What none of that supports is a number printed in a calculator. The figures differ by country, by immigration category, by the type of institution and by the time of year, and they are revised. A hardcoded limit would be wrong for most readers and stale for the rest, and it would be believed. Yours is written on your visa, your contract or your funding letter; enter it and the tool will hold you to it.
A six-hour shift does not cost six hours. It costs the shift, the journey each way, the time getting ready, and in practice some part of the evening on either side of it. Counting only the paid hours is how a job that looked like two comfortable afternoons turns into the reason an essay is late.
The tool prices each shift by the whole block it removes from the week and reports the effective hourly rate that results — pay divided by time genuinely spent, not by time on the clock. An hour of unpaid travel attached to a short shift can move that rate a long way, and it is the number worth comparing between two jobs rather than the advertised one.
Private study is the field that decides everything, and it is the one most likely to be filled in optimistically. Institutions publish expected independent study hours per credit, and they are worth looking up, but the figure to enter is what your particular courses actually take you, which laboratory and studio subjects can exceed considerably.
Understate it and the tool will hand you a generous allowance for paid work that is really borrowed from coursework. That borrowing is silent, it compounds, and it is the usual mechanism by which a term goes wrong. Enter the real number and the shortfall shows up while there is still time to do something about it.
Nobody can answer that from a web page, because it depends on where you are, your immigration status, your age, your funding and the time of year. Check your visa conditions, your funding agreement and your contract, then enter the figure you find so the arithmetic respects it.
Start from whatever your course documentation says independent study should take, then adjust it to what your own weeks actually look like after a month. Guessing low is the most damaging thing you can do here, because the hours it appears to free up are hours you will in fact still need.
Because those hours are gone whether or not anyone pays for them. Leaving them out makes a distant job look identical to a nearby one and inflates the number of shifts that appear to fit, which is exactly the mistake that turns a workable timetable into an unworkable one.
Then the week as described genuinely does not contain a job, and something above has to change: fewer contact hours, less travel, a smaller reserve, or a different plan for money such as hardship funding or a term-time-only arrangement. The number is information, not a verdict on you.