There has been an exponential rise in the number of UK university students seeking sugar daddies and mommies throughout 2019, including the University of Leeds.

According to seeking.com, the University of Leeds ranks 9th in the country for the fastest-growing sugar baby Universities of 2019. With new sign-ups in 2018 reaching 127, the total number of Leeds students on the site seeking a wealthy sugar daddy/mommy is now 728. This places it at No.8.

The idea behind ‘SeekingArrangement’ is to provide a platform for (usually) older, wealthy men and women, referring to themselves as ‘sugar daddies and mommies’ to chat and meet up with ‘sugar babies’.

Sugar babies are often seeking financial and/or romantic relationships with their partners and tend to receive cash, gifts or other financial or material benefits as a result of the relationship. On average, the monthly ‘allowance’ given to sugar babies is £2,910.

It is thought that a significant proportion of the students who are signing up for the site ‘seekingarrangement.com’ are often inspired to do so due to the excessive University-related costs that they currently face. These costs can include books, housing, utilities or even tuition fees themselves.

Nevertheless, there are growing concerns about the website targeting vulnerable individuals, such as students. Students are given a premium membership for free for instance if they sign up with their University email.

Data sourced from Seeking Arrangement shows that there are approximately 500,000 student sugar babies in the UK, with students being the most common occupation of sugar babies on their site. 

SeekingArrangement.com is regarded as one of the world’s largest networks for sugar daddy and sugar baby relationships and advertise finding both parties an “honest and empowering arrangement”. 

The founder of the site, Brandon Wade, has denied that SeekingArrangement is a form of sex work. He stated on his website: “Because the relationship between a sugar daddy and a sugar baby is romantic in nature, most sugar relationships will likely involve ‘sex’”.

He added, “Because a sugar daddy is expected to be the generous gentleman, ‘money’ will always be spent on the sugar baby. I don’t see anything wrong (or illegal) with that!”.

In 2019, there was a 36% increase across the whole of the UK of students signing up to SeekingArrangement compared to the previous year.