Free Aid and Net Price Calculator for All of Your Colleges

Can You Qualify for Any Financial Aid or Merit Aid?

Use this quick calculator to enter your information one time and see the numbers that come straight from each of the colleges on your list.

No learning the federal aid formula. No hunting down a different calculator on every college's site. See the whole list laid out in front of you, and see it now, while there is still time to do something about it. The worst way to find out is in April, blindsided, with the acceptance letter on the table and nothing left to do but let your kid down.

Show Me My Numbers

Free. About three minutes. No call, no obligation.

The Alternative Is Three Jobs You Did Not Ask For

Finding this out on your own means doing all three of these, and doing them again for every school you add to the list.

Learn the federal formula. What counts as an asset, what is sheltered, how your home and your retirement are treated and what changed in the last two years.

Hunt down every college's own calculator. Each one is buried in a different place on a different site, and none of them is where you would expect it.

Fill each one out separately. Different questions, different definitions, your tax return open on the desk, one evening per school.

Then you finish and you still cannot line the answers up, because no two of them asked you the same things.

Enter it one time here. See all of it laid out in front of you, on one screen, with the differences between the schools explained instead of hidden.

The Sticker Price Is the One Number Almost Nobody Pays

You already know the number on the website. Seventy, eighty, ninety thousand a year. It is the number that makes parents stop sleeping.

It is also close to meaningless. Colleges discount heavily, they discount differently, and two schools looking at the identical family will hand back wildly different numbers. One counts the equity in your house. The next one ignores it completely. One will chase your child with merit money. The next one gives out none at all, to anybody, ever.

You have to pay tuition. You don't need to leave a tip.

So the real question was never "what does this college cost." It is "what does this college cost us, and can we pay it."

Four Numbers, for Every School on the List

The sticker price. What the college charges everybody.

What colleges expect you to pay. Run through the federal formula, from your own figures.

What that school would actually charge you. Based on what families in your situation really pay there.

The gap. The difference between those last two, every year, for four years.

Most families have never seen those four sitting next to each other. Once you do, the whole conversation changes, because now you are looking at a number instead of a fear.

Where the Numbers Come From

Federal data, not our opinion. College Scorecard net price by income band, IPEDS published cost of attendance, and each college's own Common Data Set.
Per school, not an average. We check whether that specific college counts your home, your business and the other parent's income, because that is exactly why two calculators disagree.
A range, not a fake-precise number. Anyone handing you one exact figure is guessing. Where you tell us something is an estimate, the range widens and we say so.
Their calculator too. Every school links straight to its own official calculator, with your answers lined up ready to paste.

Show Me My Numbers

What This Is Not

It is not a lead form dressed up as a tool. You will see real numbers at the end whether you ever speak to us or not.

It is not a sales call in disguise. Nobody phones you.

And it is not an offer of financial aid. It is an estimate, built from published data that runs about two years behind, which is the same data every honest calculator uses.

Every year we meet families in November of senior year who assumed a school was out of reach, or assumed one was affordable. Both mistakes cost the same thing: options.

Show Me My Numbers

Takes about three minutes. You will need a rough idea of your income.