Over nine years, day school tuition kept pace with inflation almost exactly. Year by year, that match looks less like tracking and more like two large misses that happened to cancel.
An original dataset assembled by hand from school-published tuition schedules and archived captures of them, plus public filings, reconstructed across nine years (2017–18 through 2025–26). Every school is tracked against its own posted price year over year, which is what makes a within-school growth series possible over such a long window.
Every figure here rests on the posted-tuition record above, tracked within each school across the nine years.
Between 2018 and 2025, annual inflation ranged from well under one percent to over nine. Median nominal tuition growth stayed between three and four and a half percent the whole time, varying about one-sixth as much as the figure it supposedly tracked.
Pick a lens and watch how the two series behave. Consumer prices lurch. Posted tuition holds a customary pace. Their gap becomes the real story.
Inflation ran at 0.65% in 2019–20 and 9.06% two years later. Anything genuinely indexed to prices would register that swing. Median tuition growth held between 3.05% and 4.51% throughout, so schools applied something close to a customary annual increase rather than reading the CPI. The real price then follows by arithmetic: an ordinary nominal bump produced a +3.16% real gain in the calm year and a −5.09% real cut in the spike year. Every school in the balanced panel fell below inflation in 2021–22, the only year that happened.
A customary increase is a kind of policy, just not one anybody wrote down.
Roughly four percent a year, applied through deflation scares and the sharpest price surge in four decades. The consistency is the finding.
Median posted tuition runs from about $33,200 in California and $31,200 in New York down to $11,000 in Tennessee and $10,600 in Quebec. A threefold spread inside one sector. Hover or tap any tile for the exact figure.
Before the surge, real prices drifted up about one percent a year. During it they fell nearly three percent a year, with real declines at 78% of schools. Afterward, growth stepped up above trend, though two modest years do not undo a five-point cut.
Across seven years the median school ended 1.0% higher in real terms, essentially unchanged. That net reflects missing inflation in both directions and landing near even, and 41% of schools still finished lower in real terms than where they started.
This panel contains only Jewish day schools. Whether repricing at a near-fixed nominal rate is distinctive to the sector or common to independent schools generally cannot be determined here.
Cumulative change rests on schools present in every year. The 557 consecutive-year pairs corroborate the pattern, though the seven-year magnitude should be read with that sample in view.
These are sticker prices before aid. Real-price stability does not establish affordability.
Schools that post a public tuition schedule and leave an archived trail skew larger and more established, so the Chassidic and yeshiva sector is under-represented here.
A data project on how Jewish life is paid for. The work comes in seasons. This page is part of Season 1 — Jewish Education. It states its own sources, sample sizes and limits.
Ahead: Season 2 — Household Affordability · Season 3 — Federation & Charitable Giving
Working prototype. Every figure comes from the underlying research. Where a chart simplifies a published result, the page says so. Nothing here audits an individual school.
The paper behind this story
Nine years of day-school tuition against the CPI
Methods Download the methodology companion (PDF)
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