The comparison tool
Select up to three schools below. The tool returns the published tuition, the typical loading for that city and curriculum, the all-in annual cost, and the projected five-year cost with annual increases factored in. Data is drawn from our 2026 fee survey of 1,200 schools across 30 cities. We update fee bands quarterly.
Fee comparison, three schools
What we add to the published tuition
Every school we survey publishes a tuition figure. That number is a marketing input, not a planning input. To compare like with like, we add five categories of cost. Capital levies are the first. Most premium schools in Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong charge a development or capital fee, typically two to five per cent of tuition, used to fund the next campus expansion. Second, transport. School buses are rarely included and run from $1,800 to $4,500 a year depending on distance. Third, exam fees. IGCSE, IB and AP entries are billed separately, with the bill arriving in the final term. Fourth, the parents association levy, sometimes mandatory, sometimes voluntary but socially difficult to opt out of. Fifth, residential trips, including week-long expedition trips in Years 7 and 9 that can each cost more than a half term of tuition.
Stack those five and you have a loading of 18 per cent at the lower end (a school in Lisbon with minimal trips) and 42 per cent at the upper end (a Hong Kong debenture school where you also pay an annual contribution to the building fund). Our reference loading for Dubai sits at 30 per cent. For Singapore, 28. For Zurich and Geneva day schools, 24. Swiss boarding schools, where boarding and weekend programmes are bundled into a single bill, work differently and we treat them as a separate category in our Swiss boarding fees reference.
Want this as a planning spreadsheet?
Our free fee planner returns a five-year forecast for any three schools, with annual increases, loaded costs and a sibling-discount line. Email it to yourself and share with your employer or financial planner.
How fee inflation behaves
School fees do not track local inflation. In Dubai, fees increased between three and nine per cent each year from 2019 to 2025, with the cap set by the KHDA based on inspection rating. In Singapore the band has been wider, four to eleven per cent, with the larger jumps concentrated in the post-pandemic re-pricing. In Switzerland, day schools have moved at one to three per cent, in line with Swiss CPI. In Hong Kong, the picture is fragmented, with the established ESF schools moving at three to five per cent and the newer private through-train schools moving at six to nine. For a five-year plan, assume six per cent compounded as a working number, more if you are at a school still building out facilities, less if you are at a steady-state legacy school.
How to use the comparison without making yourself anxious
The comparison tool will surface differences of $15,000 to $30,000 a year between two schools that you previously considered equivalent. That is real money. It is also rarely the deciding factor. The right way to use the numbers is to set a band. Pick the upper figure you can sustain for the full school career, multiply by the number of children, then exclude any school that does not fit. Inside the band, do not let small fee differences override fit. Our hidden fees reference covers the items that genuinely should change a decision (the schools that bill capital levies as one-off entry fees of $25,000 plus, for example) and the ones that should not.
Cities most parents are comparing right now
For context, the most-compared cities in our tool over the past quarter were Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Geneva and Bangkok. The most-compared curricula were British and IB, with American a strong third and a clear uptick in French and German interest from families relocating into Brussels, Frankfurt and Geneva. The largest gaps within a single city were in Dubai (a 70 per cent spread between Tier 1 and Tier 3 British schools) and in Singapore (a 40 per cent spread between the IB system schools and the value-tier through-train schools). See the per-city detail at our cities directory.
FAQ
Are these fees per child or per family? Per child, per academic year. Sibling discounts where they exist are noted in the per-school detail page, not in the comparison summary.
Do you take any payment from the schools listed? No. We do not accept paid placement, advertising or referral fees from any school. The comparison is independent.
Why is your data different from the school website? School websites publish tuition. We publish the loaded cost. The numbers should reconcile if you add back the items we list above.
Can I get historical fees? Yes, our five-year history per school is available on request via the contact form. We use it for trend lines, not for comparison.
How our data is collected
Our fee bands are built from three sources. First, the published tuition figures on each school's own website, refreshed quarterly. Second, the actual invoiced figures shared by parents through our verified review programme, which gives us the loaded all-in numbers including the items that schools do not publish prominently. Third, the school census data published by regulators in cities that operate one (KHDA in Dubai, the Council for Private Education in Singapore, the Education Bureau in Hong Kong). Where the three sources disagree, we prioritise the invoiced figures from parents because they reflect what families actually pay rather than what schools advertise.
We do not accept payment from schools to feature on the comparison tool, and we do not run sponsored placements or paid rankings. Schools are added to the database based on parent demand and editorial relevance, and removed only if they close or if our research suggests they no longer meet the threshold for inclusion (a small handful of schools have been removed in the past three years on this basis).