Over the past few weeks we added sixteen UK universities to our catalogue, and every tuition figure was read off the university's own fee page rather than taken from an aggregator. Doing that sixteen times in a row teaches you something uncomfortable: the number printed largest on a fee page is frequently not the number an Indian student will pay.
Not because universities lie. Because fee pages are built for several audiences at once — home students, EU students, part-timers, three different entry years — and the international figure is one row in a structure designed for someone else.
Here is every way we were nearly caught, with the universities named, so you can check your own shortlist in ten minutes.
1. A "discount" that is a conditional scholarship
Queen's University Belfast prints this against several business-school master's degrees:
International £27,800 (£10,000 discount, see T&Cs link below)
Read quickly, that says you pay £17,800. Read the sentence underneath and it says something different: "£10,000 Scholarship available for September 2027 entry. Click this link to view the Terms and Conditions."
It is a scholarship you must qualify for, not a reduction everyone gets. Budget on £27,800 and treat the £10,000 as something to apply for. A conditional award is not a price.
2. A scholarship slider parked next to the real fee
Dundee's fee page carries a scholarship calculator whose slider runs from £5,000 to £23,200. The actual international tuition is £23,700.
Five hundred pounds apart, on the same page, with nothing visual separating them. If you skim and take the larger number you happen to see, you can walk away with a scholarship slider's maximum setting written in your budget as the fee.
3. A fee carousel that defaults to last year
This one cost us £1,200 on a first reading, and it is the trap most worth knowing.
Oxford Brookes shows its fees in a two-slide carousel. The year labels — "2026 / 27" and "2027 / 28" — sit together above the fee block as tab buttons, so they read as one heading. The slide showing when the page loads is 2026/27 at £19,600. Click the other tab and the panel changes to £20,800 for 2027/28.
The later year label sits directly above the earlier year's number. Nothing is wrong on the page; it is simply a slider, and sliders start somewhere. If a fee sits inside tabs or a carousel, click every tab before you write the figure down.
4. The biggest number on the page is a salary
Stirling's course pages carry no tuition figure at all. What they do carry is scholarship amounts (£2,000, £4,000–7,000) and graduate salary figures — £65,000, £52,500, £85,000.
Those are the largest, boldest numbers on the page, and none of them is a cost. The real fee lives on a separate university-wide fees page. Liverpool's pages have the same shape.
If a course page shows you big money and no tuition line, look for a separate fees page before assuming the course is cheap.
5. One page, three qualifications, one fee panel
Kent runs some subjects as an MSc, a PDip and a PCert from a single page, and the fee panel does not default to the master's.
Its Data Science page showed Full-time (International) £15,967 under a heading reading "Fees for Data Science — PDip". The MSc at the same university was £23,950. A postgraduate diploma is a shorter, different qualification, and taking its fee as the master's fee understates the cost by nearly £8,000.
Oxford Brookes has a related version: on its multi-award pages the home fee is broken down by award (Masters £10,250, Diploma £9,250, Certificate £5,125) while the international fee is given as a single undifferentiated number. We left two of its courses out of our catalogue rather than guess which award that number belonged to.
6. The year beside the fee is not always the fee's year
Two different universities, two different wrong years sitting beside a correct fee:
- Manchester Met — "2022/23" appears close to the fee block. It is the Graduate Outcomes survey year from HESA data, not a fee year.
- Queen's Belfast — "2026/27" appears on pages whose entry year is 2027/28. It is the year the module list describes.
A four-digit year near a fee is not a label for that fee. Find the words that attach a year to the money — "tuition fee", "entry", "academic year" — and ignore every other date on the page.
7. The fee is not in the page at all
Sheffield's course pages render an empty fee block and fill it from a separate request after the page loads. If you save the page, or read it with anything that does not run scripts, there is no fee in it — and the university publishes one perfectly clearly.
This matters for a practical reason: if a fee looks missing, it is more often hidden than absent. Across sixteen universities we found four distinct reasons a fee appeared to be missing, and in all four cases the university did publish it.
What a good fee page looks like
For contrast, Plymouth writes this:
Tuition fees for full-time international students starting in 2027-2028 academic year. Full-time study £21,650 per year
Fee status, academic year, mode of study and amount, in one sentence. Nothing to infer, nothing to click. Sheffield does the same thing structurally — each figure sits in its own box labelled "Home students" or "Overseas students" with the year beneath it.
The ten-minute check for your own shortlist
- Find the word that names you. "International", "Overseas", "non-EU" — not "Home", not "UK", not "EU". If a page shows one fee and no status label, it is probably the home fee.
- Find the academic year in words next to the money. Entry years move every September and most pages carry two.
- Click every tab. Carousels and year tabs default to something, and it is often the older, cheaper year.
- Check the qualification. MSc, PGDip and PGCert are different degrees with different fees, and they share pages.
- Separate scholarships from the fee. A discount with terms and conditions is a scholarship. Budget the full fee and apply for the award.
- Check the intake. Exeter charges different amounts for January and September entry — £30,100 against £30,300 on one course, and £30,100 against £29,800 on another.
Every programme page on this site carries the fee we read, the entry year it applies to, and a link to the exact university page we read it from. Where a university published a figure we could not tie to an entry year, we left the course out rather than publish a number we could not stand behind — which is why some well-known universities are missing from our catalogue and others are not.
If you want a second pair of eyes on what a shortlist will actually cost you, including the parts that are not tuition, our counselling is free. You can also compare published fees directly in the course catalogue.