What an international school costs, and why more than half of schools publish no price

An American international school in Jerusalem has a page on its website. The page is called "Tuition and Fees". The tuition is not on it.

A parent moving to Tbilisi goes through the same thing five times over. Five international school websites, and a price on none of them. "Contact the admissions office." "Fees are discussed individually." A page headed "Payment" that lists the discounts but not the sum they come off.

We set out to see how common this is, and read the websites of all 1296 schools in the Skolbera ranking across 19 countries. There was one question: is a price published or not.

It is, at 459 schools. Fewer than half.

The interesting part turned out to be elsewhere. Silence has almost nothing to do with the school. It has to do with the country the school stands in, and sometimes with the group it belongs to.

In Cyprus 71% of schools publish a price, in Uruguay 7%

Country names lead to the country pages of the ranking.

Top and bottom of the table are almost 10 times apart. And this is not about small markets, where a stray figure comes easily: the two largest countries in the study sit close to its two ends. Turkey, 216 schools, 34 publish a price. Thailand, 189 schools, 115 publish a price.

We looked for a simpler explanation and did not find one.

Not the level of fees: the dearest country in the study, Israel, publishes a price in 47% of cases, the cheapest, Uzbekistan, in 34%, and Cyprus, whose fees sit in the middle, in 71%.

Not the size of the market: Uruguay has 28 schools and 26 of them say nothing; Armenia has 15 and 9 of them speak. Much the same size, opposite behaviour.

Not the language and not the type of accreditation: the two largest sets in the database, Turkey and Thailand, share 13 international programmes and 15 accrediting bodies. Yet a price is published by 16% of schools in Turkey and 61% in Thailand.

Inside a country, on the other hand, schools act almost as one. Where publishing the price is the custom, nearly all of them publish it. Where it is not, nearly all of them stay silent. It looks as though the decision is taken not in the school but in the country: the country looks at its neighbours and does as they do.

Tuition: from $1 247 to $50 000 a year

This is what the schools that do speak are asking. Sums are converted into dollars at the rates of 1 September 2026, and where a school gives a range, its midpoint is taken. A school that quotes a monthly fee counts as one that publishes a price: the month is carried out to a year by the number of payments the school itself states. The table holds only countries where 5 schools or more publish a price: one or two schools do not make an average.

Schools that work inside a state per-pupil funding system are kept out of these sums: the bulk is paid by the budget and the family pays the remainder, so the published fee comes out tens of times below its neighbours. Such a school did publish a price, and in the transparency table above it stands with everyone else. What it cannot do is stand next to a full fee: these are different quantities, and the gap between them tells you about the funding, not about what the school costs. The ranking holds 1 such school at the moment, and its own fee stands on its page: the fee is taken out of the common row, not hidden.

The median across all 448 fee-paying schools with a published price: $11 064 a year.

This table needs more care than the previous one. A median describes only those who agreed to speak. In Vietnam and Thailand the share has reached 69% and 61% of all the schools in the country, so the picture there is a whole one. For Brazil it is 17 schools out of 176, for Argentina 12 out of 155, for Georgia 5 out of 29, and there is no ground for taking them as typical: if anything, the schools that talk about money openly are the ones with something to be proud of. Read rows like these as "this is what the schools that published a price cost", not as the price of the country.

What can be said firmly is the spread.

The difference inside one country is almost always bigger than the difference between countries. In Thailand schools run from 3 097 to 29 820 dollars, which is almost 10 times over. In Vietnam from 1 247 to 30 623, which is more than 24 times over. The phrase "an international school in Bangkok" says almost nothing about money, and any conversation about "the average price of an international school" falls apart at the first look at the two extremes.

The dearest row, $50 000 in Armenia, is UWC Dilijan, a boarding college that admits by competition from all over the world. It lives by a different economy from a city school and should not be standing beside one.

What schools write instead of the tuition

The most interesting part of this study is not the fees but the refusals. We looked not only at the sums but at what a school tells the reader when there is no sum. There are 480 such schools.

106 of them say nothing at all. No price, no reason, no promise to tell you later. There simply is no payments section on the site.

The other 374 do say something, and they say it remarkably alike.

Up close it looks like this.

Those 480 are the schools whose answer about price we were able to establish and confirm. For another 357 the question is still open, and we have counted them neither with the silent nor with the speaking. So the number of silent schools is no lower than the one given here, and possibly higher.

A group decides for all its schools: QSI stays silent, PASCAL publishes

The study includes 11 schools of Quality Schools International, better known by its three letters, QSI. They stand in 9 countries: Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Thailand, Vietnam.

8 of the 11 publish no price. And they do it identically: the admissions page carries a non-refundable registration fee of 300 dollars, and the rates, it says, come from the admissions office.

3 schools of the group do publish a price after all: Almaty, Atyrau and Phuket.

What makes the picture convincing is this: the silence holds even where it runs against the local custom. In Vietnam 69% of schools publish a price, and the QSI school in Hai Phong does not. In Armenia it is 60%, and the QSI school in Yerevan does not. The group decided once, and the local order is not binding on it.

It can be decided the other way round, and the example is next door. The Cypriot group PASCAL International Education, founded in 1978 and part of the international Globeducate, runs four campuses in three cities. 3 of them are in the ranking so far, and every one publishes a price: Nicosia, Larnaca and Limassol.

So it is not that groups hide the price. It is that a group decides this once and for all its schools, and the decision then outweighs both the city and the country. One group chose silence, the other chose to speak.

Why schools hide the tuition

Motives cannot be checked from a website, and we are not going to claim anything. But the data does hint at a thing or two.

The competition explanation does not add up. If a school hid its price so as not to be compared with the school down the road, the silence would be ragged: in one city some would keep quiet and others would speak. Instead it is even across a whole country, and at QSI it is even across 9 countries at once, including the ones where every neighbour publishes.

The bargaining explanation fits better. 61 schools publish discounts without publishing a price; 19 show the fee schedule only at a meeting in person. That is not how a price list behaves, it is how a negotiating position behaves: first the person comes in, then a sum is named, and the sum can turn out differently.

And there is a third, dull one: some schools are hiding nothing and simply keep their site badly. The Baku school that left its rates inside a blank contract is one of those.

Free schools with international accreditation: there are 10

The most unexpected thing in the study has no direct bearing on price at all. International accreditation does not mean that a school has to be paid for.

10 schools declare tuition free, and in every case it is clear what pays for it.

• Escuela Normal Superior en Lenguas Vivas «Sofía Esther Broquen de Spangenberg» · Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Эстетикалық бағыттағы гимназия · Uralsk, Kazakhstan
• Российско-таджикская школа имени М. В. Ломоносова · Bokhtar, Tajikistan
• Российско-таджикская школа имени Ю. А. Гагарина · Dushanbe, Tajikistan
• Российско-таджикская школа имени К. Д. Ушинского · Kulob, Tajikistan
• Российско-таджикская школа имени Д. И. Менделеева · Tursunzade, Tajikistan
• Российско-таджикская школа имени А. П. Чехова · Khujand, Tajikistan
• Президентская школа в Бухаре · Bukhara, Uzbekistan
• Президентская школа в Намангане · Namangan, Uzbekistan
• Президентская школа в Нурафшоне · Nurafshon, Uzbekistan

Five of them are the Russian-Tajik schools named after Chekhov, Ushinsky, Mendeleev, Lomonosov and Gagarin, funded from the Russian federal budget. The gymnasium in Uralsk is a Kazakhstani state school. And the school in Buenos Aires is state-run and free, but there is a fee for the international diploma programme after all.

NIS Astanastands apart, a campus of the Kazakhstani NIS network with the international diploma programme. This school has two prices at once. Under the presidential education grant "Orken" the tuition is free, but the grant is awarded only to citizens of Kazakhstan. Alongside that, the school admits fee-paying pupils into years seven, eight, nine and eleven, at 5 500 000 tenge a year. One school, two routes, and the difference between them is the whole cost of tuition.

There are more than 10state schools in the study, and some of them almost certainly charge nothing either. But this list holds only the ones that said so themselves. Three Serbian gymnasiums and three state colleges in northern Cyprus say nothing about money at all, and writing them down as free would mean deciding on the school's behalf.

What this means for a parent

One last thing, and this one is not about parents. Every figure in this study is taken from the school's own website. Not from directories, not from catalogues, not from "best schools in the city" round-ups: such round-ups name prices readily, but there is nobody to answer for them, and those figures differ from the real ones several times over. In an industry where half the schools publish no price at all, a catalogue with a complete fee schedule has almost certainly invented it. Anyone can check that: open the school's site and look for the figure you were shown.

More on this: schools with the best value for money, how the score is worked out, what each accreditation means.