Should I go back to study? Working out whether retraining pays

The real cost: fees, lost income and time

Many people price a qualification by its fees. For someone already working, the fees are usually the smaller part. The larger part is the income you give up while you study full-time, and it is easy to leave out because nobody sends you a bill for it.

Take someone on $60,000, who takes home about $46,630 a year at 2026/27 rates after PAYE, ACC and KiwiSaver at 3.5%. Two years of full-time study gives up about $93,259 of take-home pay, and about $4,200 a year of KiwiSaver contributions, yours and your employer's. Add fees, which vary widely by course and provider; at an assumed $8,000 a year, that is another $16,000, usually borrowed. So the real cost is well over $100,000, before any living costs you borrow on top.

Support can soften it. A full-time student under 55 can borrow up to $333.48 a week for living costs. A single student aged 24 or over living away from their parents may instead get a student allowance of up to $380.43 a week after tax, which replaces the living-costs loan and is reduced once other income passes $284.70 a week before tax. Allowance weeks are limited, to 120 in all if you are over 40, counting any you had before. Final-year Fees Free ends on 31 December 2026, and anyone finishing after that date will not get it. Time counts too: two years is two years less of experience in your current field, and two years more before you earn in the new one.

Pay uplift and years to recover it

The return is the difference in take-home pay between the job you would have had and the one the qualification leads to. Stay with the example. A new job at $75,000 takes home about $56,342, which is $9,713 a year more than the $60,000 job. While the student loan is being repaid, 12% of income over $24,128 goes to it, about $6,105 a year at $75,000, so take-home is about $50,237 until the loan is gone.

On those figures, the loan is cleared in under three years, with a smaller gain of about $3,608 a year while it is repaid, and the rest of the $93,259 of lost pay then takes over eight more years to earn back at $9,713 a year: around eleven years in all. That assumes you borrow only the fees and get no student allowance; borrowing for living costs lengthens the payback, and an allowance shortens it. At $90,000, the gain is about $19,068 a year once the loan is repaid, and the whole cost comes back in about six years. The size of the rise matters far more than anything else.

What is a realistic rise? The Tertiary Education Commission's figures for older graduates give a sense of it, though each point is a different group of people rather than the same people followed through. Degree graduates aged 25 to 39 had median earnings of $51,000 two years before finishing, $68,000 a year after and $82,000 five years after. For graduates aged 40 and over, the medians were $73,000, $75,000 and $86,000: a smaller first step, from a higher start. For many, two years before finishing was already partway through their study, so treat the first figure as a rough baseline. Your own field's figures will differ, so look them up before you enrol.

Part-time study while working

Studying part-time removes the largest cost. You keep your income, so the price is the fees and your evenings, and the study stretches over more years. In the example, the $16,000 of fees is covered by under three years of loan repayments at $75,000, and from then on the rise is all gain.

The trade-off is energy. Part-time study on top of a full-time job is hard to sustain for years, especially with family responsibilities. Before committing, try one paper and see how the weeks feel. Note too that the student allowance and the living-costs loan are for full-time students.

Employer-funded routes

The cheapest study is study someone else pays for. Some employers fund courses, certificates and sometimes whole qualifications, or give paid study leave, when the learning is useful to the role. Ask before you enrol, with a short case for how it helps the team, and check whether you would have to repay the fees if you left within a set time.

Some changes do not need a new qualification at all. A short course, a certificate or a move within your current employer can open the door to a new field faster and more cheaply. Our guide to professional development covers how to ask for funding and time, and our guide to changing careers in New Zealand covers testing a new field before spending money on it.

Deciding with a number, not a feeling

Write the calculation down before you decide. Four numbers are enough: the take-home pay you would give up, the fees, the take-home pay in the new field, and the loan repayments while you clear it. Divide the cost by the yearly gain after the loan is repaid to get a rough number of years to break even.

Then set that number against your working life. Eleven years to break even at 30 still leaves decades of higher pay; at 55 it may not. Money is not the only reason to study, and a field you enjoy or a job with more security can be worth a longer payback. Knowing the number means you choose that deliberately.

Start with real job ads in the new field, rather than a course brochure's salary claims. In jobtracker.co.nz, every job you save with a salary shows its take-home pay, and you can count a student loan in the figures, so you can see what the new field really pays in your hand. You can try it with a sample hunt in the demo, which needs no account.

Put the new pay beside the old