Free tool · no signup

The published price is not the price.

Colleges publish one number and charge another, and the gap between them is different at every school and at every income. Pick your income band, pick a few colleges, and see the two numbers next to each other. Families routinely find the expensive school is the cheap one.

What does your household earn?

These are the exact bands the federal data publishes. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.

Which colleges?

Add two or three colleges — ideally one you think you can't afford.

Read this before you quote these numbers

Net price is an average of what students in your income band who received federal aid actually paid, published by the U.S. Department of Education. It is not a quote and not an offer. Your own number depends on your assets, your student, and the year.
The 4-year total assumes today's price for four years. Tuition rises, and plenty of students take longer than four years — check each college's graduation rate before you assume four.
Median debt is federal student debt for the student only. It excludes Parent PLUS and private loans, which is precisely where families get hurt.
A handful of colleges publish a negative net price because average grant aid exceeds their cost. We show those as $0 rather than as a refund you can count on.

Now do it for the whole list, with the aid you can actually win.

The College Plan runs this comparison across every college your student applies to, adds the scholarships they qualify for, models the 529 gap, and compares the real award letters side by side when they arrive.

See the College Plan

Why the sticker price misleads

A college's published cost of attendance is what a family paying full freight would owe. Most families do not pay it. Wealthy private colleges in particular discount steeply and quietly — their published price is high partly because their aid budget is large, and the two numbers move together.

The consequence is a decision made backwards. Families rule schools out in sophomore year on a number that was never their number, and rule schools in on a low sticker price that comes with far less aid. The federal net-price data has existed for over a decade; it is just published one college at a time, in a form nobody reads.

This tool puts the two numbers side by side and sorts by the one that matters. It is an average, not a quote — read the caveats above, and then run the college's own net price calculator, which every U.S. college is required by law to publish.