Is Your School a No-Fee School? The Quintile Won't Tell You

Most South African parents have heard that schools are ranked into quintiles, and that the poorer quintiles don't charge fees. That's broadly true. It's also the reason a lot of parents get the answer wrong for their own school.

A school's quintile doesn't decide whether it charges fees. Its province's gazetted no-fee list decides that. The two agree most of the time. For one quintile in particular they agree barely half the time.

We checked every open school on the Department of Basic Education's register, all 25 500 of them, against the no-fee list each province has published.

Three in four learners go to a no-fee school

Of those 25 500 schools, 19 575 are on a gazetted no-fee list, which is 77% of them.

Counting learners rather than schools gives almost the same answer. The register reports learner numbers for 25 013 schools, totalling 13 676 149 learners. 10 465 764 of them (76.5%) attend a no-fee school.

The rest are split between two very different kinds of school:

• 3 184 fee-charging public schools, with about 2.5 million learners. These are the schools where fee exemption applies (more on that below).
• 2 742 independent (private) schools, with about 739 000 learners. These set their own fees and aren't covered by the exemption rules.

The quintile is a guide, not an answer

Here are public schools by quintile, set against the no-fee lists:

Quintile	Public schools	No-fee	Share
1	7 254	7 235	99.7%
2	6 015	6 005	99.8%
3	5 242	5 218	99.5%
4	1 813	836	46.1%
5	1 886	216	11.5%

Quintiles 1 to 3 behave the way everyone expects: almost every one is no-fee.

Quintile 4 does not. Slightly fewer than half of quintile 4 schools are no-fee, which makes the quintile close to useless as a guide there. Knowing your school is quintile 4 tells you about as much as a coin toss.

Even quintile 5, the wealthiest band, has 216 no-fee schools. Across quintiles 4 and 5 together, that's 1 052 schools where going by the quintile would tell a parent that a free school costs money.

Separately, 548 public schools have no quintile recorded on the register at all.

This is why Vulo never infers no-fee status from the quintile. The only thing we show as "no fees" is a school that appears on its province's gazette.

Where you live changes the odds

The share of no-fee schools varies a lot by province:

Province	Schools	No-fee	Public only
Gauteng	3 342	42.9%	64.1%
Western Cape	1 931	50.2%	62.4%
Northern Cape	601	66.6%	72.6%
Free State	1 017	74.2%	81.8%
North West	1 601	81.1%	88.6%
KwaZulu-Natal	6 098	83.1%	87.2%
Mpumalanga	1 775	83.3%	90.3%
Eastern Cape	5 281	89.0%	94.5%
Limpopo	3 854	90.1%	96.3%

Gauteng's overall figure is pulled down by its independent schools: 1 102 of its 3 342 schools, a third, are independent. The last column removes them. Even then, Gauteng and the Western Cape are the only two provinces where more than a third of public schools charge fees.

In Limpopo and the Eastern Cape, a public school charging fees is the exception.

If you're in KwaZulu-Natal, one extra thing to know: when Vulo loaded the no-fee lists in August 2026, KwaZulu-Natal had not published a 2026 list. It wasn't on the Department of Basic Education's no-fee page with the other eight, so for KwaZulu-Natal's 5 068 no-fee schools Vulo uses the 2025 list. Each school page says which year's list its status comes from, so you can tell when a newer one arrives.

If your school charges fees, you may not have to pay them

This part surprises a lot of parents. At a fee-charging public school, you have a legal right to apply for exemption from fees, and the rules for deciding it are fixed nationally. Schools don't make them up.

The rules are in the Regulations Relating to the Exemption of Parents from Payment of School Fees in Public Schools (Government Notice 1052, 18 October 2006), which the Department of Basic Education publishes on its website.

The test is a single percentage. Add the annual school fees for one child to any other money the school charges for that child to attend or take part in its programmes, then divide by the parents' combined gross annual income.

• 10% or more: full exemption. You pay nothing.
• Below 10%: you may qualify for a partial exemption. How much comes off is set by a table in the regulations, based on that percentage and on how many children you have at fee-charging public schools.
• Below 2%: no exemption.

The regulations include their own worked examples. Two of them:

• Fees of R 2 500 a year, other contributions of R 20, and a parent earning R 25 200 a year. That's R 2 520 against R 25 200, exactly 10%. Full exemption.
• The same fees, with a parent earning R 30 000. That's 8.4%, which the regulations round to 8.5%. With one child at the school, the table gives a 91% exemption: R 2 275 off, leaving R 225 to pay for the year.

Some parents qualify automatically, without the calculation. The regulations give automatic total exemption to:

• anyone responsible for a child placed in a foster home, youth care centre, place of safety or orphanage;
• a kinship caregiver of an orphan, or of a child who has been abandoned and has no visible means of support;
• a person who receives a social grant on behalf of a child;
• a child who heads a household.

The social grant category covers a very large number of households. If you receive a grant for your child, check with the school before you pay fees.

How it works in practice. You apply in writing to the school governing body, on a form the principal supplies (Annexure B of the regulations). The regulations give the governing body 30 days to decide, and require it to tell you the outcome and its reasons in writing within seven days of deciding. If you're refused, you can appeal to the provincial Head of Department within 30 days.

What a school can't do. The Department of Basic Education is explicit that "a school may not retain a learner's report because the parent cannot afford to pay school fees", and that "a learner cannot be excluded from participation in any official school programmes due to non-payment of school fees by the parent".

What Vulo shows, and what it doesn't

For every open school, Vulo shows whether it's on a gazetted no-fee list and which year's list that came from. That's the answer to "will I have to pay fees here?" for 19 575 schools.

For the 5 925 schools that aren't on a no-fee list, we mostly don't show an amount yet. There's no national register of school fees. Each governing body sets its own every year, and each school publishes it separately, if at all. Where a school has published one, we show it with its source. Where it hasn't, we say the governing body sets the fee. We don't estimate one, because an estimate that looks like a real fee is worse than no figure.

Find your school on Vulo →

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Sources. School data: South African Department of Basic Education. Master List of Schools [dataset]. Pretoria: DBE. Distributed by DataFirst, Cape Town. EMIS downloads, education.gov.za (DataYear 2025), matched against each province's published no-fee school list. Exemption rules: Regulations Relating to the Exemption of Parents from Payment of School Fees in Public Schools, Government Notice 1052, Government Gazette 29311, 18 October 2006. School report and exclusion rules: Department of Basic Education, School fees and exemption.