The Irish government has announced a new strategy to tackle the student accommodation crisis, News Editor Beth Clifford details this plan and its emphasis on the private sector.
On 24 March, Minister of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, James Lawless, published the National Student Accommodation Strategy 2026-2035. The plan sets out to deliver an additional 42,000 beds by 2035 for students across the country and seeks to address the challenges individuals face when trying to find affordable university accommodation.
Of the 42,000 extra beds, 32,000 are planned to come from purpose built student accommodation (PBSA) that will be created through public-private partnerships where private companies will be given permission to build student residence on university owned land. The remaining 10,000 beds are planned to be provided through digs in private households.
The strategy claims that the current excess, and future, demand for student accommodation is beyond the financial capacity of the Irish state to fulfill. As a result, this strategy turns towards the private sector to aid the government in developing student housing, as well as an increased focus on Rent-a-Room accommodation.
The document acknowledges the existing deficit of 15,000 beds across Ireland, leaving some students left with no other option than to commute long distances. In discussing the reasons behind this shortfall of building new student housing, the strategy states that high construction costs, lack of supply in the wider housing market, delays in the planning system, disruptions to global supply chains, and the impact of rent caps are to blame.
The plan goes on to say that the government did not achieve some of its previous targets set by the National Student Accommodation Strategy 2017-2024. The target, set nearly a decade ago, planned to produce 21,000 additional PBSA beds by 2024, but by September 2025, only 16,000 beds were actually provided. However, the number of digs available exceeded the 2024 target of 4,000 as roughly 5,500 digs were being advertised in September 2025.
Technological Universities (TUs) are also a major point of interest in this strategy as it notes that, excluding South East Technological University, no TU or Institute of Technology in Ireland currently provides on-campus PBSA for its students. TUs are particularly marked as important for the development of student housing due to their expansion in recent years and the predicted growth of 41,000 more students undertaking degrees in public HEIs over the next ten years.
By implementing this strategy, new PBSA will be subject to rent increases in the first two years linked to CPI, with no 2% rent cap on developments that began after 10 June 2025. At the end of three years, rents will be reset to market level. For students living in existing PBSA, rent control protections will remain in place until March 2029, after which, rent will then be reset to market prices.
The way this approach to delivering accommodation for students in Ireland will work is that universities will enter into formal contracts with private accommodation companies, known as nomination agreements. The university will ‘nominate’ a certain amount of students to occupy the privately operated accommodation which, according to the document, allows for the university to guarantee housing. From there, the universities will be free to negotiate rent agreements with the private suppliers.
There are no annual targets for ensuring the delivery of these beds and the Minister for Further Education says that this strategy will be introduced on a roll out basis. HEIs in the major cities of Dublin, Cork, and Galway will be addressed first, followed by Limerick, Waterford and Athlone.
Responding to this ten year strategy, UCDSU Campaigns & Engagement Officer, Kelvyn Fields, comments that “you look for a game-changer when it comes to student accommodation, and this simply is not it”. Fields acknowledges the document does a good job at recognising the problems in the government’s approach to the student accommodation crisis, but ultimately such problems are “sustained through the Government's political will, or indeed lack thereof”.
Fields expresses that “It is just a rehashing of old thinking, a document which proposes a plan which is largely subservient to landlords and corporate interests, one only needs to read through the list of lobby groups and corporate interest groups listed in the document to see that”.
In reference to the strategy centering on private developers, Fields says, “the glaring fact is that if the State had been more involved in the delivery of student beds from the get-go, there would be less of a profit motive to begin with, and most importantly, less students struggling extremely harshly and more students with a safe, secure place to live through their studies.
With a focus on providing residence for students through digs, the National Accommodation Strategy 2026-2035 “says next to nothing about any regulation for such accommodation, which organisations such as CATU and indeed Students' Unions across the nation have been calling for for years” according to Fields. Overall, Fields believes that this plan “was not written with student interests at heart”, and labels it as “incredibly disappointing, but not surprising”.