Tool · Money
Type in your child's age, the kind of school and what you've saved, and the calculator projects what a year of college will cost when they get there, using the College Board's published prices and its own decade of price changes — then shows what saving a set amount each month covers by then.
Where does each number come from?
- Your child's age, and the age they'd start
- Eighteen is the usual start and the box begins there.
- Kind of school
- Four kinds, each carrying the College Board’s average published price for this school year — tuition and fees plus housing and food: a public two-year college in your district, a public four-year in your state, a public four-year out of state, and a private nonprofit four-year. The published price is the sticker; what a family pays after aid is lower, and that’s in the leftovers below.
- Years attending
- Four for a bachelor’s, two for an associate’s.
- Saved so far
- The balance in the 529 plan, education savings account or ordinary savings account you’ve set aside for this. The statement.
- What you'd save each month
- Yours to pick. The calculator shows what it covers and what’s left.
- Yearly growth
- The rate the savings earn. The box starts at the ten-year Treasury yield, a government bond rate with a date on it.
- Yearly price increase
- How fast college prices rise. The box starts at what the College Board’s own figures show for the last ten years for the kind of school you picked — about 2.8% a year for a public four-year, about 3.3% for a private nonprofit — which is a fact about the last decade and not a promise about the next one.
What moves the answer?
Let’s say your child is 5, you’re thinking about a public four-year in your state, and you’ve got $5,000 saved. Today that school lists at about $25,850 a year with housing and food. At 2.8% a year for thirteen years, the first year costs about $37,000, and four years come to about $155,000.
To have that whole amount saved by the time they start, growing at the Treasury rate, it takes about $660 a month. At $200 a month you’d have about $53,000, which covers about a third. The price-increase box moves the target more than anything else: at the 5% some calculators use, the same four years come to about $210,000 instead, which is why the box starts at the College Board’s own decade and not at a round number.
What does the calculator take as given?
- The prices
- Are the College Board’s enrollment-weighted averages for 2025–26, from Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025, published November 2025: public two-year in-district, $15,000 with housing and food ($4,150 of it tuition and fees); public four-year in-state, $25,850 ($11,950); public four-year out-of-state, $45,780 ($31,880); private nonprofit four-year, $60,920 ($45,000). The 2026 edition is due in the autumn.
- The price increase
- Is worked out from the same report’s ten-year tables in current dollars, 2015–16 to 2025–26: about 2.0% a year for public two-year tuition and fees, 2.8% a year for public four-year in-state with housing and food, and 3.3% a year for private nonprofit with housing and food. The report publishes no ten-year figure for out-of-state students, so that option borrows the in-state rate and says so. After inflation, the College Board’s own finding is that public prices fell over the decade and private ones rose 2% in total — the increases above are in the dollars you’d pay, not in buying power.
- The growth rate
- Starts at 5.01%, the ten-year Treasury yield on 18 September 2026 from the Federal Reserve’s daily release.
- What's left out
- Financial aid, scholarships and the school’s own discount — the FAFSA and each school’s net-price calculator are where those numbers come from, and for most families they’re large. Books, travel and spending money, which the College Board puts at several thousand dollars a year more. The tax treatment of a 529 plan, which is in the plan’s disclosure document. And the fact that a saved balance gets drawn down over four years rather than spent on day one, which means it keeps growing a little while your child is in school; the calculator ignores that and so leans slightly high.
A five-year-old, a state school and five thousand saved are one made-up family; the College Board publishes the prices every autumn, your 529 statement carries the balance, and the FAFSA is where the number the school will charge you starts to take shape.
Sources
- College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025 (Ma, Pender and Hu), November 2025 — Table CP-1, average published prices for full-time undergraduates, 2025–26; Table CP-2, prices in 2025 dollars and current dollars, 2015–16 to 2025–26; Figure CP-1, average estimated full-time undergraduate budgets.
- Federal Reserve, Statistical Release H.15 — 10-year Treasury constant maturity, 5.01% on 18 September 2026, release of 21 September 2026.