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The figure on your own award letter. Zero if no limit applies to you.
Whatever binds first: your visa, your department, or the hours you have.
7.1 h
214.3 h in total, spread over 30 weeks.
That goal is above the $2,800 limit you entered, so it cannot be reached from this job inside the period however many hours you work. The limit allows 6.7 h a week, and stopping at it leaves you $200 short of the goal. Earning past an award limit usually reduces the award rather than adding to it, so the plan to change is the goal or the period, not the hours.
Getting to work costs $4.38 an hour of the rate you were offered, once the fare and the unpaid time are counted against the hours you are paid for. Fewer, longer shifts recover most of it: the journey costs the same whether you stay two hours or eight.
The award limit above is the one you typed. Term-time earnings ceilings are set by the body funding the award and are restated for every academic year, they differ between institutions, and a student visa or a departmental rule may cap your hours well below anything financial. Read your own award letter and your own visa conditions — this page has no view on what your limit is, only on what follows from it.
Everything above is gross. Tax, national insurance or payroll deductions, pension contributions and any unpaid break in a shift all come off before the money reaches you, and holiday pay, tips or a shift premium may add to it. Hours are also assumed to be evenly available across every week, which term-time work rarely is: reading weeks, examinations and closures remove some of them, and a plan that needs every single week is a plan with no slack in it.
Term-time work is constrained twice over. There is a money ceiling — the total an award or a visa lets you earn before something is withdrawn — and an hours ceiling, which is whatever your timetable, your department or your immigration conditions allow in a week. Planning against one and forgetting the other is the usual mistake, and the two produce completely different corrections.
This planner works out the hours a week your goal implies, then checks that figure against both ceilings and tells you which one bites first.
A goal of $3,000 at $14 an hour needs 214.3 hours, which is 7.1 hours a week across a thirty-week term — comfortable on paper, and about two short shifts.
Now suppose the award letter caps earnings at $2,800. That ceiling is 200 hours, or 6.7 hours a week, and at the pace the goal demands you reach it in week 28 of 30. The goal is not slightly ambitious; it is unreachable from this job, by $200, however you arrange the weeks. The fix is a longer period, a better rate, or a second source of income that the cap does not count — never simply working harder in the weeks that remain.
Take that same plan as three shifts a week, with a $4 return fare and 40 minutes of unpaid travelling each time. The week grosses $100 for 7.1 paid hours. But $12 of it goes on fares and two hours vanish getting there, so what you really earn is $9.63 for every hour you actually give up — against a headline rate of $14. Nearly a third of the job has gone before tax is even mentioned.
The arithmetic points at a fix. A journey costs the same whether you stay two hours or eight, so consolidating the same hours into fewer, longer shifts recovers most of the loss. It is also the reason a nearby job at a lower advertised rate frequently pays better than a distant one at a higher rate, and why an on-campus role between lectures is worth more than its rate suggests.
Earnings ceilings on student awards are set by whoever funds the award, differ between one institution and the next, and are restated for every academic year. Visa conditions cap hours rather than money, use their own definition of a week, and change with immigration policy. There is no single correct figure for either, and a calculator that supplied one would be quietly wrong for most of the people reading it.
So both are inputs. Take the money ceiling from your award letter and the hours ceiling from your visa or your department, enter them as they are written, and the plan above will be built around your rules rather than around someone else’s.
Every figure here is gross. Income tax, payroll deductions, pension contributions and unpaid breaks all come off before the money reaches you; tips, holiday pay and shift premiums may push it up. Availability is assumed even across the weeks, which term-time work never is — examination periods, reading weeks and closures remove some of them, and a plan that needs every single week has no room for a cancelled shift or a bad flu.
That depends on the award, which is why it is worth asking rather than assuming. Some schemes count only the earnings from the funded post itself, others count all employment income during the period, and a few count a partner’s income too. The wording on your award letter governs it.
Typically the award is reduced or the additional hours are simply not funded, which means the marginal money you worked for is cancelled out by what you lose. In visa cases the consequences are far more serious than financial. Either way, working past the limit is close to working for nothing.
Not reliably. Research on term-time employment consistently finds attainment holding up at modest hours and slipping as they rise, and a weaker degree classification is expensive in a way this planner cannot price. Treat the hours figure as a budget to stay inside, not a target to hit.
Because the journey is unpaid and the fare is real, so both belong in any honest comparison between two jobs. Entering them converts an advertised rate into what you are actually paid per hour of your life, which is the figure worth comparing offers on.