Our daughter started Year 1 this year! I was so excited, orientation morning tea, matching backpack, the whole thing. Then the first invoice landed and honestly, the excitement wore off fast. Now when I see an email from the school in my inbox I just leave it there for a day. I can’t open it straight away anymore.
Other mums at pickup say “oh it’s expensive” so casually, like they’re talking about traffic. I actually sat down with a spreadsheet one night after she was asleep and worked out what we were really spending. I felt sick looking at the total, then I got angry, because nobody had said this number to my face before we signed anything!
And this isn’t even a Year 1 thing. Junior fees don’t really change much year to year, so this is basically what every early primary year looks like for us. One thing I need to say first though because it changes everything below, we’re on the international student fee schedule, not domestic. If you’re a citizen or PR your Year 1 fees will be much lower, more like $15,000 to $25,000. The international rate at these schools usually runs a good 20 to 40 percent above what an Australian family pays for the exact same classroom. We don’t get that discount. Some schools may not mention there’s a cheaper schedule, so ask!
Tuition
$20,000 to $40,000, and that’s just tuition, nothing else. That’s actually pretty normal for a well known metropolitan school, not some inflated number I made up. Then the building fund shows up. Then a “voluntary” levy. Then something new gets added by Term 4 that nobody warned us about. I really thought I understood our fees before we signed. I didn’t.
Uniform
Just over $1,500 for the full kit. Summer uniform, winter uniform, sports gear, hat, bag, spare socks because there’s always a puddle somewhere. She’s already grown out of the winter jumper and winter hasn’t even properly started yet. Standing in that uniform shop handing over money for something I know won’t fit her by next term, that’s its own special kind of tired.
Birthday parties
Nobody prepares you for this one. If she’s invited, we go, that’s simply how it works in her class. Gift, card, sometimes a themed outfit we’re scrambling to find the night before. We went to somewhere between fifteen and twenty parties this year! I stopped counting around party twelve, it felt worse to keep track. When it was our turn to host, watching $2,000 to $3,000 disappear into a venue, an entertainer, food and lolly bags that half the kids didn’t even open, that stung.
Extracurriculars
Chinese class once a week, two and a half hours, $800 a year. Roller skating is $40 a session, swimming is $30, tennis and karate are both around $50. No instrument yet, but watching her classmates carry violin cases into assembly gives me this nagging feeling that we’re already behind on something we didn’t even sign up for.
Lunch box
This is the one part of the year that didn’t stress me out at all. A weekly Coles order for the next week’s lunchbox stuff instead of the Sunday night scramble through the shops feeling like a bad mum for forgetting the bread again. Small thing but I really hold onto it.
What it comes to
Add up tuition, uniform, birthday parties and extracurriculars and we’re at $45,000 to $55,000 for the year. That’s before school holidays, before travel, before her little brother starts in a couple of years and probably doubles all of it. Sibling discounts exist once a second child enrols and some schools take a bit off if you pay the full year upfront, but the amount really varies school to school, so ask yours directly rather than trusting a number I can’t confirm for you.
I’m not saying skip private school if it’s right for your family, it still is for us most days. I just wish someone had told me the real number before enrolment day instead of me finding it out invoice by invoice, party by party, uniform reorder by uniform reorder, each one small enough to absorb until suddenly it wasn’t. If you’re earlier in this journey than us, our guides on Queensland Prep age cut offs and how to apply and what a Prep interview is actually like are worth reading before you’re too deep in, and our school holiday dates by state page is worth bookmarking once camps enter the picture too.