Chevening pays for a full year’s master’s degree in the UK: tuition, flights, and a monthly stipend, all covered. Applications for this intake opened 4 August 2026 and close 6 October 2026 at 11:00 UTC (noon in Nigeria). You need a finished undergraduate degree, at least 2,800 hours of work experience earned after that degree, and a willingness to return to Nigeria for two years once your studies end. There’s no age limit. Apply at chevening.org/apply, select Nigeria and Scholarship, and work through registration, the eligibility check, the full form, and four essay questions before the deadline. Applying is free. Nobody legitimate will ever ask you to pay for it.
Chevening applications opened this week, on 4 August. You have until 6 October, 11:00 UTC, which is 12 noon in Nigeria, to get a complete application in.
Nine weeks sounds generous, until you see what’s asked for: four essays, two references, a full work history, three course choices. This isn’t a form you finish in one sitting, sha.
If you don’t already know Chevening: it’s the UK government’s scholarship for a fully paid, one-year master’s degree at any UK university. Tuition, flights, monthly living costs, all covered. The programme has run since 1983, and Nigeria has been part of it since 1984.
The dates that matter
- Applications opened 4 August 2026, 11:00 UTC (noon in Nigeria).
- Applications close 6 October 2026, 11:00 UTC (noon in Nigeria). The portal shuts at that exact time. No late entries, whatever the excuse.
- Eligible applications go to reading committees between mid-October 2026 and January 2027.
- Shortlisted candidates get invited to interview around mid-February 2027.
- Interviews run March to April 2027. For Nigerian candidates, that’s at the British High Commission.
- Results start coming out from mid-June 2027.
- If you’re offered a scholarship, you have until 5pm UK time on 8 July 2027 to submit an unconditional offer letter from a UK university.
- Scholars begin their master’s in September or October 2027.
That’s over a year between applying and walking into a classroom. Chevening isn’t a fast process, and it was never built to be one.
Who can apply for this scholarship
Start with citizenship. You need to be Nigerian, or a citizen of one of the more than 160 other countries Chevening covers. Nigeria has been on that list since 1984, so this part isn’t in question.
You must be willing to come home. Chevening funds a UK master’s on one condition: you return to Nigeria for at least two years after you finish. This isn’t a route into staying in the UK long-term. It’s built to send people back with a degree, not to help them relocate for good.
Your first degree matters too, though maybe not the way you’d expect. You need an undergraduate degree that would qualify you for a UK master’s programme, and you need to have finished it at least two years before the deadline. For this cycle, that means by 6 October 2024. You don’t need the certificate in hand to apply, just proof you completed the degree, though you will need the actual certificate by the time you’re invited to interview.
Then there’s work experience, which trips up more applicants than anything else here, and gets its own section below.
A few groups are shut out entirely, and it’s worth knowing them so you don’t spend weeks on an application that can’t go anywhere. You’re not eligible if you hold British citizenship, dual citizenship included. Same if you currently live in the UK, or if you or a close relative works for a UK government department, the British Council, or a partner university. Already won a Chevening Scholarship? You can’t apply again. Had a Chevening Fellowship before? You need to wait five years after it ends before trying for a Scholarship.
Everything else, Chevening says plainly, doesn’t matter. Not your gender, not your religion, not your marital status or whether you have children. Not your age either, and that one deserves its own explanation, because it’s one of the most common things people get wrong.
The age myth, and the work experience rule that matters
Chevening has no age limit. None. The official FAQ says so outright: age plays no part in how an application is judged. Scholars in their twenties get in. So do scholars in their forties and fifties. If you’ve been holding off because you assume you’re “too old” for a scholarship, that assumption isn’t based on anything Chevening has ever said. Drop it.
What decides eligibility is work experience, and the number to remember is 2,800 hours. That works out to roughly two years of full-time work, calculated on a 35-hour week, though it doesn’t need to come from one continuous job. Chevening counts full-time work, part-time work, volunteering, and internships, paid or unpaid, and you can combine up to fifteen different stretches of work to reach the total. The system adds up your hours automatically once you enter your dates.
One part of this catches a lot of people out. Your 2,800 hours has to come after you finished your first degree, not before it and not during it. So if you graduated recently, say after October 2024, you almost certainly won’t have enough hours by this year’s deadline, and Chevening is direct about it: you won’t be eligible this round. It’s not personal. It’s just the maths. Give yourself the two years, then apply next time.
What the scholarship pays for
Chevening isn’t a partial scholarship. It covers your university tuition in full, an economy flight to and from the UK, your visa fee, and a monthly living allowance for accommodation and everyday costs. That allowance depends on whether you’re studying in London or outside it, and the rate gets reviewed every year. On top of that, there’s an arrival allowance, a departure allowance for when you head home, up to £75 toward a TB test if your course requires one, and a travel top-up.
One exception worth knowing if you’re eyeing an MBA: Chevening caps its contribution to MBA tuition at £22,000. Universities often knock a chunk off that themselves for Chevening scholars, but if your MBA costs more than what Chevening and the university discount cover between them, you pay the difference. Every other eligible master’s degree is fully covered, without a cap.
Picking your three courses
You’ll apply to three different UK master’s courses, ranked in order of preference, and you need an unconditional offer from at least one of them before the July 2027 deadline. Chevening doesn’t restrict you to certain subjects. Public health, international relations, engineering, journalism, whatever fits where you’re headed, is fair game. What it does restrict is the shape of the course itself: full-time, starting in the autumn term (September or October), a taught master’s rather than a research degree like an MRes, running nine to twelve months, based in the UK, with no more than a month of it taught outside the country.
Distance learning doesn’t qualify. Neither does part-time study, a PhD, or anything shorter than nine months. The one odd exception on the books is Oxford’s Diplomatic Studies Programme, a postgraduate diploma rather than a full master’s, which Chevening funds anyway.
Chevening runs its own course finder tool on its website, and it’s worth checking before you settle on a choice, since it tells you upfront whether a course qualifies. You can apply to your universities before or after your Chevening application. You just need that offer letter in hand before the July deadline, not before you submit your Chevening form.
How the application works
Everything happens through Chevening’s online system. Go to chevening.org/apply, choose Nigeria as your country and Scholarship as your award type, and you’re in.
- Register. Accept Chevening’s terms and privacy notice, then sign up with your email and phone number. A link to the real application lands in your inbox.
- Pass the eligibility check. A short set of questions confirms you qualify. You’ll know instantly whether you passed. Fail, and you get four more tries.
- Save your access code. Once you’re through, the system hands you a unique code. Without it, you can’t get back into your own application, so keep it somewhere safe. A screenshot works fine.
- Fill in the form. This is the long part: personal and immigration details, education history (up to fifteen entries), work history (also up to fifteen, with the system totalling your hours as you go), your three course choices, two referees’ contact details, and four essay questions on leadership, relationship-building, your course choice, and your career plan. The system logs you out after fifteen minutes of inactivity, so save as you go.
- Submit. Once every section shows as complete, confirm and send it in. An email lands in your inbox confirming it went through.
Applying costs nothing. Chevening says this directly on its own site: nobody is authorised to charge a fee for helping with your application, and no payment buys you a place that wouldn’t otherwise be yours.
What they’re testing
The four essay questions aren’t random. Between them, Chevening is checking four things: whether you have real examples of leading and influencing people, whether you’ve built professional relationships that led to something concrete, whether your first-choice course connects clearly to your background and the problem you want to solve, and whether your career plan is specific enough to be believable, not just “I want to help my country develop.”
Vague answers don’t score well. “I led my team” means nothing without a result attached. What changed because you did it? Who benefited, and by how much? That’s what reading committees are looking for.
You’ll also need two referees, professional or academic, not friends or family. At the application stage, you only give their names and contact details. If you make it to interview, you have seven working days beforehand to upload their full letters, written in English, or with a certified translation if they’re not.
One more thing Chevening is strict about: keep AI out of your essays. Its guidance says so plainly, and it runs applications through tools built to catch AI-generated text, plagiarism, and copied answers. Get caught, and your application is disqualified. Write it yourself, badly if you have to, and fix it after. A rough answer that’s yours beats a polished one that isn’t.
Nigeria’s numbers, and one more warning
Nigeria has been part of Chevening since 1984, a year after the programme itself launched, and remains one of Chevening’s largest applicant pools worldwide. One recent application cycle pulled in over 9,800 Nigerian applicants, more than 1,100 up on the year before. Award numbers tell a similar story of scale: 32 Nigerians won Chevening for the 2024 intake, and that climbed to 39 scholars plus one fellow the year after. Since 1984, well over 1,500 Nigerians have been through the programme in total.
Those figures cut two ways. Chevening isn’t a long shot the way a lottery is; real Nigerians get in every year, in real numbers. But it’s also genuinely competitive, and an application put together in a rush, days before the deadline, won’t hold up against that much competition.
Which brings us to the warning. Because Chevening is well known and fully funded, it draws fake “agents” who promise guaranteed admission for a fee, or ask for money to “process” an application. Chevening doesn’t work that way. Applying is free, and nobody outside Chevening’s own team is authorised to charge for help with it. If anyone messages you claiming they can secure a Chevening slot for a price, that’s wahala waiting to happen. Block them and move on.
