We list 20 Business and Management programmes in the UK — 18 master's and 2 bachelor's — and hold a tuition figure verified against the university's own page for 10 of them.
Across those ten the annual fee runs from £17,000 to £40,450, with a median of £19,450.
That median is the finding
£19,450 is exactly the median we found for Computer Science in the UK, across a different set of 18 verified programmes. Two unrelated subjects, two separate samples, the same middle.
The honest reading is that the UK postgraduate market prices by institution, not by subject. A master's at a mid-ranked UK university costs a little under £20,000 whether you are studying management or machine learning. What changes the number is the name on the certificate — the top of the Business range is £40,450, and that is a small group of schools, not a subject premium.
For anyone building a budget, that is more useful than any single figure: if your shortlist is outside the famous handful, plan on roughly £19–20,000 of tuition and spend your effort on the living-cost side, where the difference between London and Coventry is larger than the difference between two universities' fees.
The caveat we give every time: ten of twenty are verified, so this is the shape of the market and not all of it, and a fee is always for a stated intake. The ten unverified ones are not cheaper or dearer — they are unchecked.
Where the 20 are
By city: London (6), Coventry (3), Manchester (2), Leeds (2), with Glasgow, Cambridge and Portsmouth on one each.
By institution: the University of Manchester (2), the University of Leeds (2), Coventry University (2), the University of Greenwich (2), and single programmes at the London School of Economics, the University of Warwick and the University of Glasgow.
That spread is the price story in miniature. LSE and Warwick sit at one end of the fee range; Greenwich, Coventry and Portsmouth at the other. Same subject, same qualification, roughly double the cost.
One year, and the component rule
Durations: 12 months on 16 of the 18 master's, with one at 9 months and one at 16. The two bachelor's run 36.
Where an English requirement is recorded it is IELTS 6.5 on seven programmes and 7.0 on three — and on two of them it is recorded as "6.5 with no component below 6.0".
That second form catches people out more than the headline band does. An overall 6.5 with a 5.5 in writing fails a requirement that an overall 6.5 appears to meet. If your bands are uneven, read the requirement in full before you book anything — we have written on how to read an English requirement properly.
Against the German alternative
Germany lists 97 Business Administration master's to the UK's 20 here, and most of them run 24 months against the UK's 12. The trade is the one that runs through every one of these comparisons: a year of tuition and living costs, and twelve months earlier into a salary, against depth of choice and a longer runway.
The difference for this subject specifically is that we can price the UK side and not the German one — we hold no verified fee for any German programme. That is a gap in our data, not a statement about the cost.
Browse the set: Business and Management in the UK, master's only, or the subject across every destination we list.
Fees and catalogue figures counted from our published listings on 6 October 2026: 10 of 20 programmes carry a tuition figure verified against the university's own page. Check the current figure for your intake before you apply. Photograph: University of Leeds by Tim Green (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons.