Debt interest now costs more than education

4 September 2026 · Figures in the text were correct on this date; the charts below are drawn live and will move as new periods are published.

Since 2022-23 the UK has spent more servicing its debt than running its schools, colleges and universities.

In the year ending March 2025 the UK spent £124.7 billion on public sector debt interest and £118.7 billion on education. That ordering is recent: in the year ending March 2022 debt interest cost £72.7 billion against £100.1 billion for education, and in the year ending March 2021 it was £42.3 billion against £95.5 billion. The crossover came in the year ending March 2023, when debt interest reached £130.2 billion — roughly three times its level two years earlier — while education spending stood at £107.3 billion.

The jump in 2022-23 reflects higher interest rates and the inflation uplift on index-linked gilts rather than new borrowing alone. As shares of GDP the two lines are close — 4.3% for debt interest and 4.1% for education in the year ending March 2025 — but for most of the preceding decade education's share was well above debt interest's.

Both figures come from the same HM Treasury publication (PESA), so the comparison is between numbers published side by side, not a join across sources. The charts below are drawn live from the ingested series and will move as later years are published.