What Boarding School Costs

The Headline and the Real Bill

You find a school's tuition on its website, build a plan around it, and then the real bill arrives with fees, an insurance requirement, and a line for books. Nothing there is exotic. It is just scattered across a tuition page, a financial aid page, and an enrollment contract, which is not the same as easy to find.

Financial aid adds a second layer. A grant lowers the school's bill, but not necessarily every cost around it, and the deposit, the payment schedule, and any security deposit each behave differently. Spreadsheets are nobody's idea of fun, but the worksheet below keeps them apart.

A date note: every school figure here is for 2026-27, the current year. Families applying now are applying for Fall 2027 entry, so treat today's prices as examples of what to look for, and recheck each school before you budget.

St. Paul's School shows the gap plainly. For 2026-27 it lists tuition, including room and board, at $75,400, then adds $1,480 in mandatory fees and $3,485 in estimated personal expenses, for an estimated total of $80,365.

Hotchkiss lists boarding tuition at $79,350, and its technology and health services fees raise the figure to $80,800. Health insurance is a separate line, at $4,495 for domestic students and $2,895 for international students.

Boarding or day is a cost decision too. Andover lists 2026-27 tuition at $79,800 for boarding and $63,840 for day students, and applicants choose once, when they submit the application.

Schools label similar costs in different ways, so compare what each figure includes. A total that leaves out insurance or travel has not made them free; it has only moved them onto your own list.

How Aid Is Calculated and What It Covers

A grant is aid you do not repay. The part that confuses families is who decides the amount, and which costs it reaches.

Andover describes its admission as need-blind and says it meets full demonstrated need with grants, not loans. The word demonstrated matters: Andover's financial aid office determines need by its own standards, so the number reflects the school's calculation, not what a family says it can budget.

Clarity, the application platform many schools use for aid, gathers and sorts your financial information but does not produce an expected family contribution. Each school applies its own formula, so the same family can see different contributions at different schools.

Then look at what the grant reaches. Choate says its aid analysis considers books, supplies, laundry, and travel as well as tuition, and any Choate student can apply to its Beyond the Classroom Fund for other costs.

Not every school stretches its grants the same way, so read an offer line by line. Anything the award leaves out belongs in your own budget, where the worksheet puts it.

Applying for Aid: Dates, Households, and Families Abroad

Aid runs on its own clock, and the admissions timeline guide shows how it fits beside everything else you are tracking.

Andover's admission and aid deadline for Fall 2027 entry is February 1, 2027. Other schools set their own deadlines and decision dates, so confirm them on each school's aid page: Andover, Choate, and St. Paul's.

If aid might matter at any point, ask early; schools set their own rules for later requests. Andover requires families that may want aid now or later to apply in the first application year, and Choate says families who skip aid are generally considered later only after a significant change, such as a job loss.

Aid also repeats. Choate requires enrolled families to reapply every year, and a similar financial picture generally means a similar outlay.

Households can be complicated, and the forms ask about all of it. Clarity counts a stepparent, or another adult in the household who helps care for the student, as a guardian, and divorced or separated parents in separate households each complete an application. If the other parent is not part of the child's life, or there are safety or custody concerns, contact Clarity support and ask the school how it handles the situation.

International aid is not one policy, and the details matter. Andover welcomes international applicants for aid and asks non-US families not to submit US tax forms in Clarity.

St. Paul's describes its aid for international students as limited, and its $150,000 household-income guideline for full tuition support applies only to US-based families. The international guide covers visa, travel, and guardian logistics.

A Hypothetical Worksheet

Here is the whole picture in one table. Every number is invented and matches no real school. Rows A through H are the school's bill, which aid and the payment schedule act on. Rows I and J are what you pay outside that bill, and row K combines the two.

Row E assumes the grant applies to the school bill only. If an offer also helps with books, insurance, or travel, reduce rows I and J by that amount. Watch the deposit too: it is already inside F, so it reduces H and is not added again. Payment timing then spreads H across the year, perhaps as two payments of $13,750.

A plan is not only a calendar choice. A plan fee or required refund insurance, like row C, changes what the year costs, so ask what yours adds.

The refundable security deposit (L) is separate cash. In this example you need $7,000 early, the $5,000 deposit plus the $2,000 security deposit, but only the $5,000 belongs to the year's cost; across the year you pay $39,000, plus the $2,000 held. Whether and when the security deposit comes back is a contract term.

Paying the School Bill

Payment plans differ in more than timing. Hotchkiss bills through FACTS: domestic families can pay in full, use two installments, or choose ten monthly installments for a $105 fee, and either installment option requires tuition refund insurance. International students pay in full.

Choate describes its nine-month plan as not a loan, with no credit check or interest, and every Choate payment option requires a 10% non-refundable deposit on the date in the enrollment contract.

Before choosing a plan, read the enrollment contract's credit, refund, and payment terms, and ask the billing office what the plan adds, requires, or refunds. The offers and contracts guide covers that stage.

Your next step: choose two schools, copy the worksheet, and fill in rows A, B, I, and J from each school's current posted costs. Leave the grant blank until an offer arrives.

Next steps

• Boarding School Offers, Revisits, Waitlists, and Contracts

  Use it when an offer arrives, so you can read the credit, refund, and payment terms with the worksheet beside you.

• Boarding School Admissions Timeline and Portals

  Place each school's aid deadline among the rest of your application tasks.

• International Boarding School Visa, Travel, and Guardian Guide

  Covers the visa, travel, and guardian logistics that sit outside the tuition bill.

• Dorms, weekends and safeguarding

  Plan questions about residential life.