What does a school near you cost?
Every one of the 25 500 ordinary schools in South Africa, searchable by area. 19 575 of them charge no school fees at all.
19 575
no-fee schools
25 500
schools in total
From the official register
Every school is colour coded by what it costs
Look for the colour down the side of each school in your search results.
- No fees
On the Minister's gazetted no-fee list. The state funds it in full.
- Published fee
The school has published its fee, and we link to the document.
- Fees set by the school
Charges fees its governing body sets. No figure is published, so ask the school.
Start with your province
The green bar shows how many of its schools charge no fees. Then narrow to your municipality, which the register records for every single school.
Eastern Cape
5 281 schools
89% no-fee583 charge fees
Free State
1 017 schools
74% no-fee262 charge fees
Gauteng
3 342 schools
43% no-fee1 907 charge fees
KwaZulu-Natal
6 098 schools
83% no-fee1 030 charge fees
Limpopo
3 854 schools
90% no-fee381 charge fees
Mpumalanga
1 775 schools
83% no-fee297 charge fees
North West
1 601 schools
81% no-fee303 charge fees
Northern Cape
601 schools
67% no-fee201 charge fees
Western Cape
1 931 schools
50% no-fee961 charge fees
How it works
Search by name or area
Type a school name, or a suburb, town or city. Or pick a province and municipality: every school carries one, so nothing is hidden because its address is incomplete.
Narrow it down
Filter by primary or secondary, public or independent, and whether the school charges fees at all. The filters update the list as you go.
See what it costs
No-fee schools are shown as free with the gazette that says so. Where a school sets its own fees, we say that plainly and point you at the school.
What this can and cannot tell you
It can tell you which schools are free.
The Minister gazettes the no-fee list province by province, and Vulo shows a school as free only if it appears on that gazette, with a link to the document.
It cannot always tell you what a fee-charging school charges.
Those fees are set annually by each school's governing body and published by that school alone. There is no national register, so where we hold no published figure we say so and send you to the school rather than guessing.
It is a register, not a ranking.
Vulo does not score schools, and the quintile is a poverty measure used for funding, not a mark of quality.
Questions parents ask
School data from the South African Department of Basic Education, Master List of Schools, and the department's gazetted provincial no-fee school lists. Used under a Creative Commons CC-BY licence. Vulo is not affiliated with the department.