Can I pay off student fee and living expenses while working part time in Australia?

A question I often see and was asked on Facebook groups and pages are ‘Can I pay off my student fee with the part time income in Australia’? If you want simple answer, I can say ‘Yes and no’.

This all depends on various factors like the job you get, hourly rate paid and the number of hours you work in a week.

Finding a part time job or income takes a bit of time initially; it takes about 3 months for you to understand the culture and job prospects.

I am writing this article to make ourselves understand whether a student can really afford student fee along with his/her living expenses while working part time.

Let’s analyse the living costs, study fee and the amount earned:

Earlier, I have written a post about my living expenses as a student in Australia

Living expenses

I have taken the below expenses at the minimum.

Living Costs
Expense type	Cost (A$) Per Week
Accommodation	100
Groceries and Eating out	50
Gas	20
Phone & Internet	15
Public transport	30
Total	215

Accommodation: Imagine you are sharing with another 3-4 of your friends and the cost of accommodation I have taken is the minimum. It may be more if you live in closer to city suburbs or close to university.

All other expenses are taken considering the frugal life. If you are not a good house manager, you may not achieve within the above range, add another $10 for each expense type. Add $10 more if you live in Sydney for public transport.  For our explanation purpose, we keep it at $215 per week on living expenses which adds to $11,180 yearly.

The above do not include entertainment or other travel expenses and any maintenance costs of the car (if you own one).

University fee/Course Fee:

This depends on the study you are undertaking. The course fee depends on the level of education like Postgraduate, Vocational, Graduate Diploma or Under Graduation. I have taken the college I have studied in i.e., International Institute of Business and Information Technology (affiliated to Federation University), the fees for Master of Professional Accounting are $27,600 per year for Academic year 2018.

You can consider the above as the average fee for Master’s program. This may increase to 20% or more for admission in a top university or slightly lower if any University offers lower fee. For the sake of our analysis, let’s go for the average fee to calculate cost of education.

Let’s convert into weekly amount which would be $27,600÷52 weeks = $530 per week.

From the above, we analysed the possible expenses for an international student:

Let’s summarize them per week:

Expense type	Cost (A$) per week
Living Costs	215
Course Fee	530
Total	745

 

Now let’s go to the income side of it:

Potential Income:

International students are only allowed to work 40 hours per fortnight. Some websites quote it as 20 hours per week, but officially it is 40 hours per fortnight, which is slightly different. This is exactly worded in the home affairs website:

40 hours per fortnight gives the students more flexibility. For example, you could have a week off of work and the following week work 40 hours to catch up. If it was 20 hours per week, you wouldn’t be able to do that. That said though, it still only adds up to 1040 hours of work per year, plus whatever you can get during those ‘out of session’ times.

The minimum wages in Australia currently (2018) is $18.29 per hour or $694.90 per 38 hour week (before tax).

Casual employees also get at least a 25% casual loading. That means you get extra 25% if you work as a casual staff ($18.29 plus 25% extra that equals to $22.86 per hour)

Let’s take an ideal situation that you work 20 hours each week for 52 weeks and extra 20 hours during that 20 weeks break. Assume that you took semester break during summer:

Income
	No of hrs pw	No. of weeks	Hourly rate	Amount($)
During Semester	20	52	22.86	23,774.40
Semeser Break	20	20	22.86	9,144.00
Total				32,918.40
Estimated tax				3,010.18
Total Income				29,908.22
Per week income				575.16

From the above, we have analysed the expenses as $745 p/w where as income is $575.16 p/w; this is resulting in short of $169.84 p/w.

Conclusion:

The above analysis shows that a student secures a job that pays the minimum wages with a casual loading of 25%. Even then, it is short of $169.84 p/w. Hence, paying fees with the minimum wages are not possible while studying in Australia.

Don’t get disappointed! If you can secure a job with good pay; you can pay off living and student fee in Australia. Imagine you get a job with $30 ph, you can make it just right for fee and living expenses as below:

Income
	No of hrs pw	No. of weeks	Hourly rate	Amount($)
During Semester	20	52	30	31,200.00
Semester Break	20	20	30	12,000.00
Total				43,200.00
Estimated tax				5,587.00
Total Income				37,613.00
Per week income				723.33

 

This is an ideal situation that you work 20 hours during semester and 40 hours during semester break. However, this may not be possible all the times. Sometimes, you may work more than 40 hours during semester break but depends on the job requirement. It may be hard to find 40 hours work sometimes during the break. .

I had worked about 60 hours a week during my break. So, it all depends on the job and available hours.

It is easy if you earn a good part time job to pay off your fees and living expense. Hope for the best that you achieve a good job. At the same time, you ensure that you have enough fee support from home for your study.