UCL turned a surplus at around £104 million in 2025 which will be reinvested back into the University.
UCL was one of 17 Russell Group universities to make a surplus while seven are in deficit.
The BBC reported that four in ten universities were facing a deficit this financial year, meaning they were spending more money than they were raising.
On top of the changes to UK tuition fees which came into effect this academic year, we may see something of a natural selection occurring in higher education, and you may be glad — or saddened — to know that UCL is one of the few places which is unlikely to be affected by this due to its effective business model.
Income exceeds expenditure
With record-high income from tuition fees and contracts, UCL has once again turned a surplus at around £104 million. Being registered as a UK charity means UCL has to reinvest this money into the University for the benefit of students, rather than working like a private company which can pay surplus to its shareholders. How UCL reinvests this money is largely up to them.
Last year’s surplus was £454 million, so this may seem like a significant drop-off. However, last year’s surplus resulted largely from a one-off payment that UCL received from the universities pension scheme due to an accounting muck-up which UCL had to pay-in to fix.
You can read about it in last year’s review if you’re curious.
The University also lost around £46 million in “sub-optimal costs” to their contractor ISG, responsible for the developments at the Institute of Neurology’s Dementia Research Institute in 2024.
This likely means unexpected issues or additional costs from the renovations.
Slow and steady choices bring small gains
One of UCL’s methods of income is to invest in stocks, equities, and companies which they do through two companies – CCLA and Cazenove – that specialise in investing on behalf of charities and NGOs (one of CCLA’s main clients is the Church of England, God bless our stocks!).
This is to provide them with another potential source of revenue should anything go wrong.
To do this, UCL adheres to a self-imposed ethical investment policy that vaguely determines what companies it is allowed to invest in through its partners.
The Cheese Grater covered this in a story earlier this year, when the University came under scrutiny for investing in a technology company working for the Israeli government.
It will be interesting to see if it remains the next time a report is released.
For what was a very volatile financial year, UCL’s investments have remained largely unchanged and steady, making about a 0.9% year-on-year increase across the board.
This demonstrates a very risk-averse sort of behaviour where both firms hold lots of investments in a variety of financial products to reduce potential losses, otherwise known as diversification.
You, dear reader, are a UCL stakeholder
Did you know that you are a stakeholder at UCL?
All staff and students fall under stakeholders, and UCL has to address what they do for us specifically in this report. We are represented through our academic and policy reps who meet for the departmental, faculty, or Students’ Union-related committees.
The University also has its own set of committees which are explained in the Governance section of the document.
For any company or institution, regulations put in place are not just financial; there are also structures designed for people and admin-related issues that can arise and affect UCL’s ability to properly function.
These are tied to institutional credibility, and can have a knock-on financial or branding effect.
UCL would likely have you believe our representation is highly effective, yet anyone who has worked on one of these committees understands that they can often be very bureaucratic in nature and navigating them can be complex.
This section is important for UCL to tick due diligence boxes as a company but we can have endless arguments about their effectiveness.
Money, money, money! It’s a rich man’s world
As someone who has been an academic rep for three years, it can feel like a sluggish monolith of a system at the worst of times.
If you want to read more about this, I discussed UCL’s institutional engagement problems in a previous story. There are many reasons for this, and you can find the article on The Cheese Grater website.
This was a broad overview of what is going on with UCL’s finances.
However, I encourage you to read a bit more deeply if you are interested. It does you no harm to better understand where your tuition fees go.
UCL’s internal processes are undoubtedly quite complicated.
We will all be better off if we can understand a little bit more about how this educational behemoth works.