I started ExpatSchoolFinder because I was tired of seeing expat families pay €20,000 for private schools simply because they didn't know how to navigate the state bilingual portal. We do the digging so you don't have to.
Most school information online is outdated, incomplete, or written for a local audience. Here's what makes our data different.
Every piece of data on this site passes through three verification layers before it reaches you.
We track national policy changes in real-time.
Most school directories are updated once a year — if at all. We monitor government gazettes, ministry announcements, and parliamentary records across all 7 countries we cover. When a policy changes, our data changes within days, not months.
Our 2026 England data accounts for the 20% VAT addition to independent school fees — a change introduced in January 2025 that adds £3,000–£8,000 per year to the average private school bill. Many global directories still show pre-VAT figures.
We don't just look at websites.
School websites are marketing materials. They're often out of date, incomplete, and written for a local audience that already understands the system. We contact school secretarias, admissions offices, and cluster directors directly — in the local language — to verify what's actually happening on the ground.
For our Portugal guides, we verified the specific PEBI bilingual status for the 2026 cycle at the cluster level (Agrupamentos). Three schools that appeared on the official PEBI list had paused their English-language streams for 2026 due to teacher shortages. We removed them from our recommended list before any family applied.
Our calculator uses "Total Cost of Ownership" logic.
Schools quote tuition. We quote reality. The true cost of an international school includes registration fees (often non-refundable), mandatory uniforms, school trips, lunch programmes, after-school activities, and "voluntary" contributions that are anything but voluntary. Our calculator models all of these — so the number you see is the number you'll actually pay.
A Swiss international school quoting CHF 28,000 tuition typically costs CHF 36,000–42,000 in year one when registration (CHF 4,000), uniform (CHF 800), lunch (CHF 2,400) and mandatory activities (CHF 1,200) are included. Our calculator surfaces this automatically.
Every country guide is independently verified before each enrollment cycle. Here's the current status.
Methodology pages usually only tell you what a company does well. Here's what we deliberately don't do.
Schools cannot pay to appear higher in our results or be featured in our guides. Our rankings are based solely on verified data.
All fee data, contact information and programme status is verified by humans through direct outreach — not scraped or AI-generated.
We remove schools from our guides when we can't verify their current status. An outdated listing is worse than no listing.
We only publish guides for countries where we have direct verification capacity. We'd rather cover 7 countries well than 30 countries poorly.
Start with our free country guides, or use the cost calculator to see exactly what you'll pay — and what you could save.
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We use essential cookies to keep the site working and optional analytics cookies to understand how families use our guides. We never use cookies to track you for advertising or share data with schools. · Data Ethics Policy