What a UAE school year actually costs

Every school website, every comparison table and every fee survey leads with annual tuition. It is the easiest number to publish and the least useful one to budget against, because it is not what you will pay. This guide covers what sits on top of tuition, and, more usefully, how to stop guessing and get your own school’s complete figure in writing.

The document most parents do not know exists

This is the single most useful thing on this page, so it goes first. Since June 2022, every KHDA-registered private school in Dubai has been required to publish a School Fees Fact Sheet. It is a short document listing every charge for the academic year: the mandatory fees, the optional ones, and the extras such as transport, books, trips and activities. Where a school offers discounts or scholarships, those appear on it too.

If a school is slow to produce it, that is itself informative. It is a regulatory requirement, not a favour.

What sits on top of tuition

KHDA regulates the mandatory fees, which is a genuine protection, but regulated does not mean small or optional. Broadly, costs fall into three groups.

Regulated and mandatory

• Tuition, the advertised figure, usually payable in three termly instalments rather than one.
• Application fee, charged when you apply, often non-refundable and payable per child.
• Registration fee, charged to accept a place. Usually deducted from the first term’s tuition, though the conditions vary.
• re-enrolment or re-registration deposit, charged each year to hold your child’s place for the next one. This is the one that catches families out, because it falls due long before the year it applies to.

Charged separately, and often unavoidable in practice

• School transport, priced by route and distance, and for most families not genuinely optional.
• Uniform, including PE kit, and at many schools a specific supplier.
• A device, where the school runs a one-to-one laptop or tablet programme, sometimes bought through the school.
• Books and materials, depending on the curriculum stage.
• Exam entry fees for GCSE, IGCSE, A level or IB, which land in the senior years and are not trivial.

Genuinely optional, but budget for some of it

• After-school clubs and activities, some included and some charged.
• School trips, including residential trips in the senior years.
• Lunch, where there is no packed-lunch option.

We are deliberately not publishing a single percentage for what the extras add. It varies enormously by school, by year group and by whether you use transport, and a tidy national average would be a worse guide than your own school’s Fact Sheet, which gives you the real number.

What the 2026-27 fee freeze does and does not cover

KHDA has confirmed no increase in private school tuition fees in Dubai for 2026-27. That is real and welcome, and it is narrower than it sounds. The freeze applies to tuition. Transport, uniform, devices, trips and activities are not tuition, and a school can still change what it charges for them. Re-registration deposits also continue to fall due as normal.

So a frozen headline fee does not mean a frozen bill. The full picture on the freeze, the normal approval process for increases and current fee ranges is in the Dubai school fees guide. If you are in the capital, Abu Dhabi runs its own rules through ADEK: see the Abu Dhabi fees and ratings guide.

What to ask before you accept a place

Ask these in writing, and ask before the registration fee is paid rather than after.

1. Can I have the current School Fees Fact Sheet for the year my child will start?
2. What is the total payable in year one, including registration, uniform, transport and any device?
3. When does the re-enrolment deposit fall due, how much is it, and is it refundable if we leave the UAE?
4. Which charges are per child and which are capped per family? Sibling discounts vary widely.
5. What happens to fees already paid if we relocate mid-year?
6. Are exam entry fees included at GCSE, A level or IB, or billed on top?

The refund and mid-year exit question matters more than families expect. Relocation is common in the UAE, and in Dubai the answers are not actually left to each school: KHDA caps the deposits, sets a 60-day deadline that decides whether they come back, and fixes how a mid-year refund is calculated. Those rules, and the separate limits on what a school may do if fees go unpaid, are in the guide to Dubai school fee rules.