Free tool · for families comparing college offers
College Net-Price Estimator
Net price is the full cost of attendance minus gift aid only — grants and scholarships, nothing else. The figure an award letter prints is built to look like net price, and isn't. A letter can net loans against the cost as though borrowing were a discount, count a campus job as aid, and quote a figure built from only what the college bills you directly — leaving travel, books and everyday spending out. Type one college's real numbers into this sheet and it gives you the true cost of college for that year: what it costs you once only the grants and scholarships come off.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Adds up the full cost of attendance for a year — including travel, books, personal spending and the health-insurance charge a letter can leave off the number it quotes you.
- Subtracts gift aid and nothing else. A loan is not a discount — it is a decision to pay later with interest, and work-study is a job you still have to find.
- Sets that honest figure beside the number the letter's own arithmetic produces once work-study and loans come off too, and shows the gap between the two in one row.
- Keeps work-study and loans visible but separate, so you can see exactly which parts of the offer are money and which are a job or a debt.
- Opens pre-filled with a complete worked example for an invented college, so nothing starts blank and you can see the arithmetic before you touch it.
- Opens in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice — no macros, no signup, nothing saved anywhere but your own file.
Related reading
Own it, don't rent it
Holding more than one award letter — and wondering which college is really cheapest?
This free sheet does one college for one year, and stops at the honest net price. The full workbook puts up to six letters side by side, classifies every line against an 81-entry award-letter decoder, prices each loan down to its origination fee and its ten-year payment, projects every year of the degree with each college's own scholarship-renewal rule, and tells you whether the plan closes inside the federal borrowing caps at all.
A one-time purchase you keep, and open again for the next child. No subscription, no account, no lead form, and it works offline.
A financial planning aid, not licensed financial, tax or legal advice, and not a promise of what any college will charge. The college and the figures the sheet opens with are an invented example. Confirm every line of your own award letter with the college's financial-aid office.