From experience, and rental growth analysis, 1.9 : 1 students per bed is a useful proxy calibration for a ‘balanced’ market Note iii (to page 23) There are many student housing markets in the UK: some we would consider under-supplied, some balanced, and some saturated. There are two potential measures we can use to gauge where each sits: one is a student-to-bed ratio, and the other is rental growth. It is interesting to compare the two to see their correlation, and also highlight the limitations of each, particularly given that the ’shocks to the market’ in 2025 were prone to make the dials go crazy on whichever tool of measurement one tried to use. Graph iii.1 uses Student Crowd data to plot student housing markets (i.e. towns and cities) as an individual dot, according to these two measures: along the y-axis, a student-to-bed ratio using 2024/25 HESA data, using the ‘demand pool’ of students (i.e. excluding those in their own or parents’ homes), and existing PBSA beds in 2025/26 (both university and private); and along the x-axis, an average annual rental growth between September 2023 and September 2025, for private sector PBSA only (as university rental increases are often dictated by policy rather than market forces), and focused on en-suite rooms (as a typical product excluding expensive studios and more affordable schemes with shared bathrooms). We have only included those room types that can be directly traced across the two-year interval. The graph is scaled for ease of reading to exclude a few outliers, as we are primarily interested in the correlation for the majority of markets. There is a visible correlation shown by the white dotted trend line in Graph iii.1, although there is a great deal of variance either side of this. In general, the greater the student-to-bed ratio, the harder it is for a student to find a bed, and so the greater the average rental increase. The large variance is mainly caused by each of these markets having, to a greater or lesser degree, alternative accommodation options for students that are invisible to this analysis (e.g. HMOs, other private sector options, and commutable satellite dormitory destinations). Thus, there are markets with high student-to-bed ratios but modest rental growth, because so many students are finding HMOs rather than competing for limited PBSA, and markets where the reverse is happening. As a proxy for determining whether a market is under- or over-supplied, we compare these rental growths to CPIH for the same period, a yearly average of 3.33%, shown by the vertical red dotted line. The majority of markets with a student-to-bed ratio of at least 1.9 : 1 experienced rental growth above CPIH. This accords with analysis that SFG has undertaken for individual universities and markets as part of more detailed demand and supply studies. This student-to-bed ratio is a useful proxy for considering the UK as a whole, where we might expect at least some of the variances between markets to cancel each other out, but this is not a hard and fast rule, and too blunt a tool for analysing individual markets. A Student First Group research report | April 2026 | Page 47