College Cost Calculator

Projected tuition with cost inflation, savings and investment growth.

Federal benchmarks describe a household as cost-burdened once housing takes 30% of income, and that line is crossed in most large coastal metros. Childcare in many states costs more per year than in-state tuition, and both sit outside the categories older budgeting advice was written for.

American household budgets face costs that have outrun wages for decades: rent, childcare, health insurance and college tuition have all climbed faster than median income. The 50/30/20 split — half to needs, a third to wants, a fifth to saving — is the rule most US budgeting advice is built on, though housing alone often breaks it in coastal cities.

Published tuition is rarely the price students pay: institutional aid, federal grants and merit awards bring the net figure down substantially, and the gap between sticker and net price varies widely between colleges. Room, board and fees add a further share of the total.

Shares are read against take-home pay rather than gross salary, because tax and benefit deductions never reach the account in the first place.

Housing, transport and food take the largest share of most American budgets, and the categories that grew fastest over two decades — childcare, health insurance, tuition — are the ones fixed in advance and hardest to trim when income falls.

College Cost Calculator sits with the rest of the library's finance work, and it rests on the same household-budgeting arithmetic the way a lender's disclosure or a bank statement does. Its answer is only as good as the assumptions standing behind it.

The quantities it works from — or start from a college type, today's annual college costs, college cost increase rate, expected attendance duration and percent of costs from savings — are the ones a real household-budgeting question actually turns on, and each carries a convention of its own, set out below.

Money questions in America turn on the same few trade-offs: how long a balance is carried, what rate applies to it, and whether the money is being paid down or built up. Inflation sits behind all of them, since a figure that looks generous at today's prices buys less at tomorrow's, and comparisons across decades are made in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

American products also disclose their costs in prescribed ways, from the APR on a consumer loan to the annual percentage yield on a deposit account.