Families budget for tuition. Tuition is the number on the website, the number in the brochure, and roughly half of what the year will actually cost.
Here is the rest of it, in the order you will pay for it.
Before you leave
- Application fees — some universities charge per application, some do not.
- English test — and possibly twice, if the first score falls short.
- Translation and certification — transcripts, certificates, sometimes birth certificates. Small individually, and there are more of them than you expect.
- Tuition deposit — usually required to secure the place and trigger your CAS or equivalent. Typically a few thousand.
- Visa fee and health surcharge — the UK health surcharge alone is £776 for each year of the course, paid upfront in one sum. A three-year degree is £2,328 before you have set foot on a plane.
- Flights — one way, at the most expensive time of the year, usually with excess baggage.
Accommodation, which is the real variable
Rent differs more between cities than tuition differs between universities. A room in London can cost twice what the same room costs in Sheffield or Newcastle. Sydney is not Wollongong. Toronto is not Saskatoon.
This is why we build a shortlist around total cost rather than tuition alone. A university charging £3,000 more in a cheaper city is frequently the less expensive year.
Budget for a deposit, usually a month or six weeks of rent, and check whether bills are included. In halls they generally are. In private housing they generally are not, and heating a British flat through January is not a small line.
The first month
The first month abroad always costs more than the ones that follow. Bedding, kitchen equipment, a winter coat that is genuinely warm enough, a phone contract, a travel card, textbooks, and a housing deposit if you did not settle it from home.
Plan for roughly double a normal month.
Living, ongoing
Food, transport, phone, internet, laundry, and something left over for having a life. Students who budget to the last dinar and leave nothing for going out tend to be miserable, and miserable students come home early. That is not a soft consideration, it is a financial one.
Health cover varies by destination. In the UK the surcharge buys NHS access. In the United States, Canada and much of Europe you are buying insurance separately, and it is not trivial.
What you can offset
Most destinations allow term-time work within a limited number of hours. It helps. It is not a plan. Do not build a budget that only balances if you find a job in your first fortnight in a city you have never lived in.
Scholarships and partner discounts genuinely move the number, and they reward early applicants — funding is largely awarded as applications arrive, not purely on merit.
A working number
As a rough planning figure, take the published tuition and add the same again for a first year. It is crude. It is also much closer than tuition on its own.
For real figures by country, our destination pages carry tuition and living cost ranges with the date each was last checked. Where a page shows no figures, it means we have not verified them recently and would rather show nothing than quote something stale.