Child Education Cost Calculator India – School to Post-Graduation

Education spend isn't a slope. It's a cliff.

Most parents plan for the average and get hit by the spike.

For fifteen years the bill is a school fee — annoying, rising, but payable from a salary. Then two things land almost together. Entrance coaching starts in Class XI, stacking ₹1.2–1.8 lakh a year on top of school fees. And at eighteen the undergraduate bill arrives, which for several paths costs more in a single year than the previous five years of school combined.

That is what the chart above is for. The number at the end matters less than the shape of the line, because the shape tells you when you need the money — and money you need in year fifteen is invested very differently from money you need in year three.

The two honest numbers for education inflation

Every education calculator on the internet uses 10%. Nobody says where it came from.

There are two defensible numbers and they disagree:

The CPI figure is real and official. It also does not describe a private-school parent, because most of the institutions inside it charge almost nothing. The survey describes private-school parents precisely — 31% reported a 10–20% hike, 28% reported 20–30%, and 22% reported over 30% — but it is one year, self-reported, and captures the year fee protests broke out across Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

We default to 8% and put the slider in your hands. If your school's fee letter has arrived, use the number on it. That beats both.

What the money actually buys, with sources

Every figure below is at August 2026 price levels and is a starting point in the calculator, not a fixed input. Change any of them.

School (annual, metro band)

Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities run lower — the calculator scales by city band, and that banding is ours, not a measured index. There is no national per-city school fee statistic in India. Anyone showing you one has made it up.

Entrance coaching (Classes XI–XII, annual)

Allen's classroom courses run ₹1.22–1.42 lakh a year, with dropper batches at ₹1.30–1.70 lakh. Living away in Kota adds ₹4,500–12,000 a month. Two years of coaching plus hostel can cost more than four years at an NIT.

Undergraduate (annual tuition, excluding living)

The government-versus-private gap is the single biggest variable in the whole calculation. A government MBBS seat costs roughly one-fortieth of a private one — which is why the coaching bill in Classes XI and XII is, in cost terms, an investment decision rather than an expense.

Hostel and mess at a government college runs about ₹78,800 a year (IIT Bombay, 2025-26) before personal expenses.

Post-graduation (whole programme)

The UK's one-year format is its main cost advantage: one year of tuition and one year of living instead of two.

Why we don't just add up the goals

The obvious way to compute the SIP is to treat each stage as its own goal, work out a SIP for each, and add them up. That number is wrong, and it is wrong in the expensive direction — it overstates what you need.

Money invested for the age-22 MBA keeps compounding while the age-17 coaching bill is being paid out of the same pot. Treating them as separate goals ignores that overlap.

So this calculator simulates instead. Month by month, the balance grows, the SIP goes in, and each bill is withdrawn in the month it falls due. Then it searches for the smallest monthly SIP whose balance never goes negative. The second chart shows that balance — rising, absorbing each spike, landing at zero on the final payment. Zero at the end is the point. A corpus that finishes with a large surplus means you over-saved for this goal and under-saved for everything else.

The one thing worth doing today

The calculator shows what the same goal costs if you start twelve months from now. That number is always larger, for two reasons at once: you lose a year of compounding at the front, where it is worth the most, and you add a year of fee inflation at the back.

For a five-year-old on a private-school-to-engineering path, a year of waiting typically adds a few thousand rupees to the monthly requirement — permanently, every month, for the next seventeen years. It is the most expensive year of the whole plan, and it is the only one entirely within your control.

What this tool will not do

It will not name a scheme, rank a fund, or tell you what to buy. NYVO is a SEBI-registered investment adviser, and a page that quietly steers you toward a product is an advertisement wearing a calculator's clothes. This works out what the goal costs and what funding it requires. What you fund it with is a separate decision, and it depends on facts about you that this page does not know.