How HECS has changed since 1989: debt, fees and policy over time

HECS began in 1989 with a flat annual charge of $1,800, a compulsory repayment threshold of $22,000, and a maximum repayment rate of 3% of income for the highest earners. That single, flat-rate design, introduced under the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, is the starting point for everything that follows.

That scheme is now called HECS-HELP, one of several loan types grouped under the wider HELP system alongside loans for full-fee-paying students, vocational courses and study overseas. The national debt figures reported by the Australian Taxation Office cover the wider HELP system, not HECS-HELP alone. HECS-HELP is generally understood to be the largest part of the system, but a current breakdown by loan type was not available in the sources reviewed for this article. The figures below therefore tell the broader HELP story, and any figure specific to HECS-HELP course charges is noted directly.

HECS-HELP timeline: key changes from 1989 to 2026

The $1,800 flat charge of 1989 has grown into a system where indexation now runs at 2.8% and the repayment threshold sits at $69,528 for 2026-27. Course prices, indexation rules and repayment settings have each changed more than once along the way.

How student contribution amounts have changed over time

Student contribution amounts have risen by about 20% across every listed field since 2021. Every field of study costs more in 2026 than it did in 2021, although the dollar increase is larger for fields that already had higher student contribution amounts.

The dollar gap between the cheapest and most expensive fields has widened alongside the percentage rise. In 2021, law cost $10,550 more than education for the year; by 2026, that gap had grown to $12,661.

How average HELP debt has grown across the decades

The average HELP balance has grown by about 165% since the mid-2000s. Debt has grown faster than the number of borrowers, and a much larger share of debtors now carry balances above $50,000.

The total HELP debt balance grew about 3.8 times as fast as the debtor count between 2005-06 and 2024-25, showing that average balances increased as well as the number of people with a debt.

What happened to university fee deregulation in Australia?

On 2 December 2014, the Senate voted down a bill that would have removed the cap on student contribution amounts. Student contribution amounts have remained regulated since then.

The Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill 2014 proposed removing the maximum student contribution amounts that providers could charge students in Commonwealth-supported places, among other changes. Its second reading was negatived in the Senate, and its official status is recorded as "not proceeding".

Instead, the regulated schedule has been redrawn through later changes, including the Job-ready Graduates pricing reset from 2021 and the annually indexed 2026 rates. Australia has kept government-set student contribution caps for Commonwealth-supported places, while changing the way those caps are structured by field.

How much HELP debt does Australia have?

HELP debt reached $82.2 billion by 2024-25, more than six times its 2005-06 level. Over the same period, the number of debtors grew more slowly, showing that total HELP debt has risen faster than the number of people with a debt.

Two figures often get confused when discussing national HELP debt: the outstanding balance debtors owe, and the government's own accounting estimate of what it expects to collect.

How HECS repayments have changed since 1989

The compulsory repayment threshold has fallen from about 85% of average full-time earnings in 1989 to just over half in 2021-22. The core design has stayed the same: students borrow through a government loan system and repay through the tax system once their income reaches the repayment threshold. The price structure, repayment rates, indexation rules and balance settings have all changed.

The first row shows this in dollar terms. Compulsory repayment started at $22,000 in 1989, and by 2021-22 the threshold of $47,014 equalled just over half of average full-time earnings. Measured against wages rather than nominal dollars, the repayment threshold sat lower relative to average earnings in 2021-22 than it did when HECS began.

Compared with the 1989 rules, the differences run through every part of the design, not just the headline numbers.

A student starting a Commonwealth-supported place in 2026 pays more in nominal terms, repays under a different formula, and has their debt indexed differently than a student did in 1989. Both systems use the same broad principle: students borrow through the tax system and make compulsory repayments once their income reaches the repayment threshold.