Updated August 2026 for the 2027 fee year, with new guidance on payment surcharges and payment options.
The annual fee update is one piece of communication that every family in your school will pay close attention to.
Setting the fees is a board and leadership decision. Communicating the new year fees lands with the business & marketing team — and it’s arguably just as hard as setting them. It requires balancing transparency, empathy and clarity while protecting the trust of a parent community who, understandably, would probably rather not be reading it at all.
There’s a reason to give it a fresh look each year. This year, two things have shifted: the way card payments are surcharged is changing, and the parent cohort now enrolling has different expectations about how they pay. A find-and-replace on last year’s numbers won’t cover it.
Here’s how to we suggest you should approach the 2027 fee update — and what to change before it goes out.
Plan early, communicate (well) in advance
Plan to communicate fee changes in Term 3 or early Term 4 — not in the final weeks of the year. Families need time to budget, and they need staff to still be there when the questions come. A fee letter that lands two days before the holidays is a fee letter nobody will read as they’re already thinking about the beach!
This year the Term 3 window matters more than usual. There are payment changes to work through before the letter is drafted, and a few of them affect what you’re able to say. More on that below.
Give Marketing a voice
At Feesable, we firmly believe that marketing has a big role to play when it comes to school fees.
Communicating fee increases isn’t just an administrative task; marketing must play a key role in shaping the message. Many schools simply send out the new fee statement to parents with a bland message about fee increases – this lack of care and intentionality is a great way to erode trust with your current families.
Really, this is a retention exercise as much as an administrative one.
Marketing professionals know how to shape a message that resonates with your parent community — clear, empathetic, and consistent with the school’s brand and voice. They’ll also push for the small details that make a message feel human: addressing parents by name, referencing their children and year groups, acknowledging where a family sits in their journey with the school. That’s a marketing instinct, but it’s your finance data that makes it possible. The two need each other more than either usually realises.
Bringing marketing in doesn’t mean handing over the message. It just means the business manager gets to convene the people who can help a difficult message land well.
Be Confident and Transparent
When communicating a fee increase, be confident and upfront about the reasons. People value transparency and honesty. In our School Fees in Australia: 2025 Report, 92% of parents said fee transparency matters to them, and fees ranked second only to a school’s values and culture in how families choose a school. It’s clearly not a topic families are indifferent about — which is worth remembering when you’re deciding how much to say.
State the facts and provide context, keep it concise, but try to avoid over-justifying the increase. Clear, confident messaging tends to resonate better than a lengthy explanation that can come across as slightly defensive.
Highlight how the increase supports the school’s commitment to its mission and values, and reinforce the benefits to students and families. Casting a vision for where the school is heading helps bring families along and see the bigger picture.
We do still occasionally come across schools shying away from talking about fees, making subtle efforts to keep them out of view. We’ve even heard business managers say “…parents might find out how much it actually costs…”. We’d suggest that’s a losing strategy — and not great for the relationship with families.
Fees are a non-negotiable part of private education, and parents know this. They’ll find out eventually anyway. Our view is that it’s better to be confident and transparent at all points, from new enrolments through to yearly fee updates. You can read more on why in our piece on why fee transparency is essential for building trust.
Demonstrate Empathy
It is important to acknowledge the impact that fee increases can have on families. Show empathy and understanding in your communication, and offer support where possible. Provide information on scholarships, payment plans, or bursaries to alleviate concerns for families facing financial difficulties.
Often the justification for fee increases is linked to funding building projects and facility upgrades. While this is true and important, it is important to make sure this is not the sole focus. Practising empathy here looks like considering parents who are thinking – “…how does this new building help my child who is struggling with bullying and confidence in class?”. Business managers need to look beyond the building projects and think about the full educational experience the school offers when communicating fee increases.
One practical thought: if you’re offering payment plans or hardship support, it can be worth naming them in the letter itself, with a person and a direct way to reach them. A general invitation to “get in touch if you have concerns” puts the first move on the family least equipped to make it. In our experience, families under real pressure rarely raise their hand first.
The impact of changes to surcharges
Most fee letters, fee schedules and website fees pages carry a standing line about card surcharges. It’s usually been there for years, and it usually gets copied forward without much thought.
That line will need a look this year. Card surcharging rules are shifting from October 1, and the wording you’ve been reusing since 2019 may not quite describe what happens when a parent pays.
The part worth thinking about is that the cost of accepting card payments doesn’t disappear — it lands with the merchant, which in this case is the school. That makes it a fee-setting question as much as a communications one, and probably one to work through before the letter is drafted rather than after it’s sent.
Which brings us back to transparency. Families will already know something has changed — they’ll have noticed it buying coffee and groceries. They’ll have formed a view, and if the school doesn’t say how it’s handling the change, they’ll fill the gap themselves.
For most schools, a short and plain note on the fee schedule will do the job. For others it may be a more significant change to announce — some schools are weighing up whether to remove credit cards as a fee payment option altogether. That’s a legitimate call, but it’s one worth explaining rather than simply announcing: what’s changing, why, and what families can use instead.
We’ve written more on what the change means, and the options available, in Beyond the Surcharge.
An opportunity to make changes
A fee increase announced on its own is a cost. An increase announced alongside more flexibility starts to feel more like a change.
Compare “fees will increase 4.5% from Term 1” with “fees will increase 4.5% from Term 1, and in 2027 you’ll be able to pay fortnightly or monthly by direct debit“. Same increase. Quite a different letter.
It’s also a natural moment to check whether what you offer still matches what your community expects. Our research found younger parents — the ones enrolling right now — are around three times more likely than Gen X to prefer newer payment options like PayTo, and noticeably less likely to reach for a credit card.
Expanding choice hasn’t always been easy, of course. It’s often meant more work landing on the finance team, but that doesn’t have to be the case — here’s some tips on how to navigate this in another article, The Flexibility Trap.
Show families their number, not just a generic number
A percentage is fairly abstract. Not many parents can translate “a 4.5% increase across all year levels” into what it means for their household, and most won’t try — they’ll wait for the invoice and feel it then.
$34,580 for the year, or $8,645 per term is real. It’s possibly more confronting. But we’d argue most families would rather have it. Certainty is easier to plan around than a vague sense that things are going up.
The gap between vague percentages and real numbers is usually a technology gap, not a goodwill one. Schools aren’t necessarily sending percentages because they want to be vague — they’re sending them because producing 900 personalised fee summaries by hand isn’t realistic. Which is exactly the sort of problem technology should be solving.
A guided workflow vs a static PDF attachment
The default for most schools is a blanket email with the new fee schedule attached. Every family gets the same document, works out their own numbers, and the questions and requests come flying in on email and via phone.
There’s a better version of that moment. Feesable’s Fee Review workflow gives each family a simple guided flow: they see their own personalised fees for the year ahead, then make their choices as they go — payment schedule and method, voluntary contributions, any options the school offers. It takes a few minutes, and at the end the school has a confirmed position for that family rather than an inbox of follow-ups.
For families, it turns a static announcement into something they can actually act on. For your team, it turns fee update season into a workflow instead of a chase. And the same thinking applies further up the journey — the School Fee Calculator on your website lets prospective and current families generate a personalised breakdown at any time, without waiting for a letter.
So we encourage you to think beyond ‘sending a letter’ and explore ways to leverage innovative technology to help parents get a clear picture of the changes, clarify any doubts and hence build trust.
Expect complaints, and design the response
No one enjoys a fee increase, so it makes sense to anticipate some frustration, especially in the current financial climate. Being prepared to manage those concerns empathetically goes a long way.
It helps to provide a simple way for parents to get in touch. Given how sensitive it is, ideally that’s a direct line to the Business Manager, Bursar or even the Principal. That kind of openness builds real trust.
The conversation you want is the one that happens before a family decides to leave, and that only tends to happen if the path to it is obvious. A parent who complains is still engaged. A parent who says nothing and quietly doesn’t re-enrol has already gone.
Bringing it together
Communicating a fee increase well takes more than delivering the numbers. It takes confidence, transparency and empathy — plus a bit of coordination between the teams who each hold a piece of the message.
Get it right and the one letter every family reads becomes something more useful than an announcement. It becomes quiet evidence that the school is well run, honest about its costs, and thinking about the people paying them.
If you’re working through what the payment changes might mean for your 2027 fee schedule, or looking at how to give families a better experience without adding to your team’s workload, we’d love to start that conversation. Get in touch.