International School Cost Index 2026

Methodology & Notes

• Data sourced from the WhereNext International School Database — 0 schools with published tuition fees across 0 cities in 0 countries.
• For each school, we use the true annual cost (published tuition + estimated hidden fees including registration, transport, uniform, and activities) when available, falling back to the midpoint of the published fee range. Schools without published fees or with fees outside $1-$200,000 USD/year are excluded as outliers. The $200K bound is a defensive backstop — the most expensive premium boarding schools cap around $150K, so anything higher is almost certainly an unconverted local-currency value that escaped the seed-script normalization pipeline.
• City medians are calculated only for cities with 3 or more schools reporting tuition, ensuring statistical significance.
• All fees are in USD. Original local-currency fees from sources like Apify and the International Schools Database are converted at import time by scripts/seed-schools-db.ts using a static exchange-rate table covering 50+ currencies. Currency conversion is enforced at the seed boundary, not at query time, so downstream analytics can trust that tuition_min_usd and tuition_max_usd are already in USD. scripts/check-currency-data.ts verifies the live database state and scripts/compute-school-analytics.ts refuses to write analytics if any school has tuition above $200K USD.
• Percentiles: P25 and P75 define the interquartile range (middle 50% of schools). P10 and P90 define the range containing 80% of schools.
• Curriculum categories reflect what schools self-report. Many schools offer multiple curricula (e.g., IB + British) and are counted in each.
• This is informational data for research and comparison purposes. Always verify current fees directly with schools before making enrollment decisions.

Sources: WhereNext International School Database, official school fee schedules. Full methodology