Going to a top private school could cost an American family with two children nearly $ 1 million–or $ 500,000 per child. But short of that, sending your kids to any better-quality school–even a public school–can considerably increase the costs of being a parent.
Tuition at top-tier prep schools–those awarded a 9/10 or 10/10 by the national non-profit GreatSchools–averages about $ 40,000 a year for fees, according to new research by real-estate website Trulia. “You could be talking about $ 1 million for families with more than one child for the best prep schools,” says Mark Hamrick, Washington, D.C. bureau chief with personal finance site Bankrate.com.
Outside the top tier, private school isn’t as prohibitively expensive. The average private school costs $ 11,000 a year–around $ 317,000 total for a family that sends two kids to private school, K through 12. The annual cost for private schools of all quality ratings ranges from $ 7,000 for Catholic schools and $ 9,000 for other religious schools to $ 22,000 for non-sectarian private schools (only 20% of students go to non-religious private schools).
Still, even the average cost of one private school tuition amounts to two-thirds the cost of a higher-than-average house. The average cost of $ 11,000 a year equates to 12 monthly payments of $ 912, according to Trulia. The effective monthly cost of a $ 300,000 house is $ 1,326 a month, and tuition (for just one child) increases that monthly sum to $ 2,238 a month. “That’s roughly equal to the effective monthly cost of a $ 520,000 house,” says Jed Kolko, chief economist at Trulia. “That’s a lot of extra house.”
Those top-tier fees, meanwhile, are faced mostly by parents in just a few metro areas. “Fees of $ 40,000 are typical for a large economically vibrant city like Washington, D.C.,” Hamrick says. D.C. has very well regarded public schools, he adds, but parents choose to send their kids to private schools to give them a head start over public school children who live right around the corner. “Some parents will hope Johnny does well playing lacrosse or swimming and hope he has a shot at winning a scholarship to an Ivy League school,” he says. “In Manhattan, parents vie to get their kids into elementary school.”
Finding the best public schools is no cheap endeavor either. More than two-thirds of parents say that the neighborhood, including local school quality, is the most important factor when choosing a home, according to Trulia. But they will pay for the privilege of getting into a good one: Analyzing data from the Census Bureau, along with asking prices for homes, Trulia found that housing costs–excluding property taxes, which are often high in sought-after school districts–are 41% lower than average in neighborhoods with the lowest-rated public schools and 32% higher than average in areas with the highest rated public schools. Assuming an average new home price of $ 270,000, that 32% would add $ 172,800 to the cost of owning a home over 20 years.
The states with the highest rates of private school enrollment include Louisiana, Hawaii and mid-Atlantic states; it’s less common in the mountain states and southwest. But private school enrollment varies more widely among the largest 100 metro areas in the U.S. New Orleans had the highest private school enrollment (with 25% of children in grade 1 to 12 in private school), followed by Honolulu (21%), San Francisco (20%) and Baton Rouge (19%). The cities with the lowest rates include Fresno, Calif. (3.7%), El Paso (4.3%), Bakersfield, Calif. (4.6%) and Las Vegas (5.5%).