Donna McGettigan (Clare, Sinn Fein)
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441. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills for a breakdown of costs for the special rate threshold from €25,000 to €26,200 in 2024-2025; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [28397/25]

James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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The Student Grant Scheme is targeted at those students who are most in need of financial assistance and the Special Rate of grant is a key tool in targeting student grant assistance at the cohort of students who are most in need.

The qualifying criteria for the special rate of maintenance grant in the 2024/25 Student Grant Scheme was as follows:

(i) The student must qualify for the standard rate of grant;

(ii) Total reckonable income in the reference year, after income disregards and Child Dependent Increase(s) are excluded, must not exceed €26,200; and

(iii) As at 31st December 2023, the reckonable income must include one of the eligible long-term social welfare payments prescribed in the Student Grant Scheme.

The income threshold for the special rate of grant is strategically aligned with the highest Department of Social Protection rate, which is the maximum point of the weekly State Contributory Pension plus the maximum Qualified Adult Allowance for a person over 66 years, in order to target students from households in receipt of long term social welfare assistance effectively. The income threshold for the special rate was increased from €25,000 to €26,200 for the 2024 Scheme to keep in line with increases in the old age pension. Subsequently, for the 2025 Scheme the special rate income threshold will increase to €27,400 aligned with the highest Department of Social Protection rate.

This measure was to ensure that students would not be negatively impacted by other Government initiatives (namely increase to Social Welfare) it was not intended to bring significant level of additional people into the special rate of grant. It is expected that c. 80 more students will be paid special rate in 24/25 in comparison to 23/24. If this measure had not been introduced it is anticipated that c. 2,000 students would have likely experienced a negative rate change. The impact therefore of this measure was mainly to retain the status quo for these students.

A number of measures were introduced in 2024 and 2025 including increasing the special rate of grant, and increasing the holiday earnings deduction which may also have had an impact on paid applicant numbers. It is therefore not practicable to distinguish any additional spend on this measure in isolation.

Donna McGettigan (Clare, Sinn Fein)
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442. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills for breakdown of costs based on the increased holiday earnings threshold from €6,552 to €7,925 from 2024-2025; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [28398/25]

James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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Under the Student Grant Scheme, ‘holiday earnings’ is income that a student has earned outside of term time in the previous tax year which can be deducted from the total income assessed, up to a maximum level.

A student’s earning is taken into consideration over the year and is treated as income with the exception of earnings over holiday periods. Over the past few Budgets, the amount a student can earn during holiday periods (Easter, summer and Christmas) has increased as follows:

• from €6,552 in the 2023/2024 academic year to €7,925 in the 2024/2025 academic year,
• from €7,925 in the 2024/2025 academic year to €8,424 in the 2025/2026 academic year.