Free for parents · Updated monthly
Find the right Dubai school for your child.
Search 212 KHDA-registered private schools. See the real annual cost: tuition plus every additional fee. Ranked to your home, your budget, and your child’s year.
For families moving to Dubai, and for those choosing their next school.
- Schools
- 212
- Neighbourhoods
- 40
- Curricula
- 17
A note from the founder
Hi. I’m Ambika.
I started looking for the right Dubai school for my daughter, and three months later I still didn’t have an answer. Thirty browser tabs. Two spreadsheets that disagreed with each other. Four school visits on the wrong side of the city.
I am a biology teacher. I have spent over a decade in classrooms, working with higher-secondary students. I still got lost in this search.
So I built what I had been looking for. Dubai School Finder is free for parents, and it always will be.
What you actually pay
The headline tuition isn't the whole bill.
We add it all up.
Every Dubai private school is required by KHDA to disclose transport, books, uniform, activities, and the Knowledge Dirham levy. The fees are published, just scattered across a 6-page PDF per school. We do the arithmetic for you.
A realistic example
A British Year 4 place in a mid-tier Dubai school lists tuition at AED 52,000.
Here is what KHDA actually requires the school to charge, added up for the whole academic year →
Year 4 · British
Real Annual Cost
2024-25 AED
- Return school busAnnual+ 7,140
- Books & learning materialsAnnual+ 650
- UniformAnnual+ 800
- Extra-curricular activitiesAnnual+ 1,155
- KHDA Knowledge Dirham levy10 AED / school day+ 1,900
Real annual cost
22% more than the sticker price
AED 52,000
Dubai School Finder
× 14 years ≈ 891,030
Every one of the 212 schools, ranked to your home.
How we rank schools
Four signals.
Nothing else.
No ads. No sponsored schools. No pay-to-rank. Every school gets the same match score built from four weighted signals, the same signals Dubai parents actually ask us about.
Quality
DSIB rating
0%
KHDA's 5-tier inspection rating decoded into an integer 1–5. Outstanding tops. Weak bottoms.
Commute
Distance from your home
0%
Haversine great-circle kilometres from your pin. Not 'Dubai'. Your exact home.
Cost
Fee fit vs budget
0%
Real annual cost (not headline) normalised against your budget. Missing fee data is penalised.
Fit
Curriculum match
0%
British · American · IB · Indian · Any. Fuzzy-matched across common aliases (UK ≡ British).
All 212 schools scored against your home in under 15 milliseconds. Every filter change re-ranks instantly, no network calls.
Decide
These weights are ours.
What matters to your family?
Tell us what counts most, commute, fees, academics, curriculum, and the 212 schools re-rank live. Send it to your partner and see which schools you both agree on.
Why trust this?
Built on KHDA's data. Verified against school websites. Open methodology.
We extract fee data from KHDA fact sheets using OCR, cross-reference it with published school fees, and normalise everything into a single comparable format. The pipeline runs once per academic year when KHDA publishes updated inspection results.
212
KHDA-registered schools
Every private school in Dubai, sourced directly from KHDA inspection reports and published fee schedules. No school is excluded or promoted.
Open
Methodology published
Our scoring weights, distance formula, and fee normalisation logic are documented and available for anyone to review.
Read our methodologyZero
Paid placements
No school pays to rank higher. No sponsored listings. No affiliate fees from schools. The ranking is the ranking.
By neighbourhood
Already decided where you'll live?
Jump straight into a neighbourhood. Each area page lists every school within 10 km, ranked by DSIB rating.
Downtown
Metro access62 schools within 10 km →
Dubai Marina
Metro access44 schools within 10 km →
JVC
61 schools within 10 km →
Business Bay
Metro access59 schools within 10 km →
Arabian Ranches
34 schools within 10 km →
Dubai Hills
75 schools within 10 km →
Al Barsha
Metro access67 schools within 10 km →
Jumeirah 1
55 schools within 10 km →
Mirdif
80 schools within 10 km →
Silicon Oasis
31 schools within 10 km →
Discovery Gardens
42 schools within 10 km →
Palm Jumeirah
36 schools within 10 km →
About Dubai School Finder
Built for families moving to Dubai, and for those choosing their next school.
Dubai School Finder indexes every KHDA-registered private school. Tuition, ratings, location, curriculum, and the non-tuition fees every school is required to disclose. Updated every inspection cycle.
No ads above the fold. No sponsored schools. No tracking that follows you around the internet. Free forever.
Find your school