Proof of funds, destination by destination (2026)

Every destination asks whether you can pay for the education you have applied to. None of them asks it the same way, and the differences are not cosmetic — they determine when your money has to move, whose name it has to sit in, and how long before filing the clock has to have started.

The three questions behind every threshold

A financial requirement looks like a number. It is actually three tests wearing one number as a coat. The first is sufficiency: is there enough. The second is availability: can the applicant actually reach it. The third is provenance: where did it come from, and does the explanation survive a second look.

Students prepare almost exclusively for the first test. Refusals cluster around the second and third. A balance that appeared eleven days before filing satisfies sufficiency perfectly and fails availability and provenance simultaneously, and no amount of arguing about the total will recover it.

That is why this guide is organised by destination rather than by amount. The amounts are easy to look up. What is hard — and what actually decides files — is the shape each country imposes on the money: how long it must be held, whose account it may sit in, what it excludes, and at what point in the timeline it has to leave your control.

United Kingdom: a period, not a balance

The UK maintenance requirement is £1,483 per month for study in London and £1,136 per month outside London, for a maximum of nine months. That produces the two headline figures: £13,347 and £10,224. These amounts are required in addition to any outstanding tuition.

For applications made on or after 30 November 2026 those monthly figures rise to £1,570 in London and £1,203 outside it. If your funding position is tight and your intake allows it, filing before that date is worth several hundred pounds of headroom.

There is one deduction available. Accommodation payments made to your institution can be offset against the maintenance requirement, capped at £1,529 for applications made on or after 11 November 2025. Students routinely forget to claim it and occasionally over-claim it; both are avoidable.

The critical feature of the UK requirement is not the amount but the holding period. The funds must sit in an acceptable account for a required consecutive period ending shortly before the application date. This is the single most common avoidable UK refusal we see, and it is entirely a scheduling failure. A family that can comfortably afford the education loses the cycle because the transfer landed a fortnight too late.

“A family that can comfortably afford the education loses the cycle because the transfer landed a fortnight too late.”

Canada: an instrument, not an account

Canada publishes its requirement to the dollar. For applications made on or after 1 September 2025, outside Quebec, a single applicant must show CAD $22,895. Two people require $28,502 and three require $35,040. These cover living costs only — tuition and travel are required in addition, not included.

Most of that is satisfied through a Guaranteed Investment Certificate, with a minimum of CAD $20,635 outside Quebec and CAD $14,549 in Quebec. The GIC is the reason Canada is, counter-intuitively, one of the easier destinations to evidence for a student whose family accounts are messy. A GIC is an instrument with a purchase date and a certificate. An account balance is a story that has to be told.

The other Canadian variable is the attestation letter. A provincial or territorial attestation letter is still required for most applicants, drawn against a provincial allocation, but from 1 January 2026 master's and doctoral students at public designated learning institutions are exempt. For 2026 the federal cap is set at up to 180,000 study permits for applicants who require an attestation letter, against 309,670 application spaces.

Read those two numbers together and the planning consequence is obvious: if you need a PAL, apply early in the allocation year. Provincial allocations are consumed in order, not distributed on merit.

Australia: capacity, plus two things students forget

The Subclass 500 financial capacity requirement is AUD $29,710 of living costs for twelve months. It is required in addition to tuition fees and the cost of a return airfare, and it is the airfare line that students most often omit.

The second omission is Overseas Student Health Cover, which must be held for the entire length of the stay and is paid up front. It is not part of the $29,710; it is another cheque.

Australia also now assesses the Genuine Student requirement, which replaced the Genuine Temporary Entrant test. Financial capacity feeds into it: an applicant whose funding is barely sufficient, with no explanation of how living costs will be met if anything changes, is making a Genuine Student argument as much as a financial one.

United States: reconciliation, not a threshold

There is no national US figure. The school calculates a cost of attendance and prints it on your Form I-20, and that is the number you must evidence. The requirement is therefore reconciliation rather than sufficiency: your documents must match the I-20 precisely, and where they exceed it, the surplus must be explicable.

What is fixed is the fee structure. The I-901 SEVIS fee is US$350 as of February 2026, and the DS-160 / MRV fee is US$185 — a minimum of US$535 in government fees before any institutional deposit, courier charge or domestic travel.

Interviews in 2026 are short and focus on funding credibility and academic intent. The practical consequence is that the financial file has to be reducible to two spoken sentences. If it takes a paragraph to explain who is paying and why, it will not survive four minutes at a window with a queue behind you.

Germany: a monthly release, not a lump sum

The blocked account requirement for 2026 is €11,904, calculated as €992 per month across twelve months. The Opportunity Card and job-seeker visa require a higher figure of €13,092, at €1,091 per month. EU and Schengen citizens are exempt entirely.

The blocked account is not merely a threshold. It is a cash-flow instrument: the money is released to you monthly at €992, which means students who budget against the annual total rather than the monthly release run into a liquidity problem in month one, when deposits, registration and setup costs all land at once.

It must also be opened, funded and confirmed before the visa appointment — and appointment slots at German missions are themselves scarce in peak season. The sequence is: admission, then account, then slot. Reversing any two of those costs a semester.

“The sequence is: admission, then account, then slot. Reversing any two of those costs a semester.”

Ireland: money that leaves before the decision

Ireland requires €10,000 per academic year in addition to course fees. That much is conventional. What is not conventional is the second requirement: the D Study Visa application must evidence that at least €6,000 has already been paid toward tuition, or the institution's required minimum deposit where that is higher.

This inverts the usual order. In most destinations the deposit is a commitment you make after a visa is granted, or at worst a risk you take on a high-probability file. In Ireland the payment is a precondition of the application itself.

The planning consequence is that loan disbursement, family transfers and deposit deadlines all have to be sequenced months earlier than students expect. We have seen more Irish files delayed by a semester for this reason than for any academic cause.

New Zealand: two thresholds, one window

For courses of one year or longer, New Zealand requires NZD $20,000 per year of living costs, in addition to tuition and travel. That is the study-stage figure.

The second figure belongs to the post-study stage and is the one students never plan for. A Post-Study Work Visa applicant must show NZD $5,000 in available funds and must apply within three months of their student visa expiring — six months for doctoral graduates. The visa itself grants up to three years of open work rights for Level 7 qualifications and above.

From 16 November 2026 a Short-Term Graduate Work Visa adds six months of open work rights for graduates who do not meet the Post-Study Work Visa criteria. It is a narrower door, but it exists where previously nothing did.

Diarise the three-month window on the day your student visa is granted, not in your final semester. It does not extend, and there is no discretionary route back into it.

What to do with all of this

Build the funding timeline before you build the shortlist. For each destination on your list, write down four dates: when the deposit must be paid, when the funds clock must start, when the instrument must be opened, and when the application can be filed. In three of the seven destinations covered here, at least one of those dates falls before you will have a visa decision.

Then check the figures yourself. Every number in this article is sourced below and was last verified in September 2026. Thresholds in this sector change more often than any other published figure, and a guide — including this one — is a starting point, not an authority.

• UK — £13,347 London, £10,224 outside; rising 30 November 2026
• Canada — CAD $22,895 single applicant, GIC minimum CAD $20,635 outside Quebec
• Australia — AUD $29,710 living costs, plus tuition and return airfare
• USA — the I-20 cost of attendance, plus US$535 minimum in government fees
• Germany — €11,904 blocked account for 2026, released at €992 per month
• Ireland — €10,000 per academic year, plus €6,000 tuition paid before filing
• New Zealand — NZD $20,000 per year, plus NZD $5,000 at the post-study stage