How much does homeschooling cost in the UK?

Ask ten UK homeschool families what a year costs and you'll get ten different answers, all correct. That's because the range is very wide: from a few hundred pounds a year if you're using free resources and a public library, to £10,000 or more a year if you go with a full online school. The variable isn't the child, it's the delivery model you pick.

This guide walks through what a UK home education year costs in 2026, with figures pulled from Department for Education guidance, four named private candidate exam centres and current provider fee schedules. Every number here has been checked against a primary source. Fees quoted were current as of July 2026 – always check the specific centre or provider before booking, because rates move each academic year.

Most UK homeschool spend maps onto one of three routes. Very few families stay purely in one lane – a lot of budgets mix free resources for some subjects with a paid provider for others – but the ranges below give you a starting picture of what a year looks like.

The most widely cited media figure is "£1,000 to £8,000 a year". That's a fair rough band for the middle of the market but it's an aggregator number, not a primary source. Neither Education Otherwise nor HEAS publishes an official per-child annual figure in 2026 – both refer parents to helplines. What is sourceable is each cost line, so that's how we've built the ranges below.

For a homeschool family with a child in the GCSE year, exam fees are one of the biggest cash cost, and the one families most often underestimate. Four UK private candidate centres publish fee schedules that give a reliable market picture.

For a typical nine-subject GCSE line-up at a mid-range centre, including Combined Science and a modern language, exam fees alone come to roughly £2,880. At a cheaper centre with a leaner five-subject line-up, you can bring that down to around £1,000 to £1,400. A London centre with a full nine-subject load can push the exam bill to £3,500 to £4,500.

At A-Level the story is similar but the science practicals surcharge changes the shape of the bill. Three humanities A-Levels at a lower-cost centre come to around £960 in exam fees. Three sciences with the practical assessment element at Tutors & Exams can hit £4,587. Cambridge and Pearson International A-Levels are materially cheaper for sciences – three subjects across six units at Excel come in around £1,710 – which is why home educators disproportionately pick international routes for science A-Levels.

This is where the routes really diverge.

Free route: BBC Bitesize, Oak National Academy, Cognito (free video lessons and questions for GCSE Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Combined Science and Maths, plus notes and questions for English Language, English Literature and Geography), Corbett Maths, Dr Frost Maths, Physics & Maths Tutor. Add CGP or Collins revision guides at around £5 to £10 per subject – a full nine-subject set is £45 to £90 one-off. Total materials: £50 to £150 a year.

Paid course provider route: Wolsey Hall Oxford runs an asynchronous self-paced model at bundle pricing – £570 per course for one to three subjects, £522.50 per course at four, £475 per course at five or more, plus a £95 one-off registration. An eight-course GCSE bundle paid up front is £5,937.50. Oxford Home Schooling (a course provider, not a school) charges £375 per GCSE or iGCSE subject, with bundle discounts (£725 for two, £1,075 for three); optional tutor marking is around £10 per assignment (one-to-one tutoring is around £40 an hour).

Full online school route: King's InterHigh publishes a fee band of around £2,750 to £6,605 a year according to third-party school directories – confirm directly. Cambridge Home School Online charges £6,099 a year for Primary Prep and £10,950 a year for all stages above that. Minerva's Virtual Academy charges £9,365 a year for 2026/27 including a £930 deposit and £95 subscription. Nisai Virtual Academy is on enquiry; local authority commissioning is common for pupils with EHC plans.

Most homeschool families use tutoring to plug gaps rather than as a main teaching method. Typical GCSE tutoring rates on MyTutor and Tutorful sit at £30 to £60 an hour in 2026. Kip McGrath charges around £35 a session for weekly maths or English. One hour a week across 40 school weeks is £1,200 to £2,400 a year per subject.

A common pattern: no tutoring at KS3, a handful of hours a week in Year 11 to shore up weaker subjects, an English essay tutor throughout GCSE because written feedback is the hardest bit to self-mark.

The most under-priced item on every homeschool budget is opportunity cost. The Department for Education flags this itself: "Such costs may not just be direct but also indirect (for example, loss of income if a parent is at home educating a child)." A parent moving from full-time to part-time work to home educate can lose more income in a year than the full cost of a top-tier online school. Not a cash outlay, but it's real money.

Other lines that get missed:

• Exam-centre travel – private candidate centres are geographically thin, so families often travel for exams. Budget £100 to £500 a year.
• Access arrangements – David Game charges a £100 application fee, £55 an hour for computer use and 25% of the exam fee for extra time.
• One-off IT – laptop, headphones, printer. £300 to £600 in year one, then negligible.
• Group activities, co-ops and trips – secondary aggregator estimates put primary-age families at £600 to £1,800 a year here.
• Sports club fees, music lessons, forest school – varies wildly, £0 to £2,000+.

For the subjects Cognito covers – GCSE Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Combined Science and Maths, plus English Language, English Literature and Geography – the teaching, quizzing and topic-tagged exam-style question layer is free. That takes the biggest single non-exam cost off the budget for those subjects.

Cognito has video lessons alongside notes and questions for Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Combined Science and Maths. For English Language, English Literature and Geography, coverage is notes and questions rather than a full video series. Try it at cognito.org.