How we rank and price Dubai schools.

01 · The match score

Four signals, weighted once, re-ranked in under 15 milliseconds.

Every school gets a match score between 0 and 100 against your pin, child’s age, curriculum preference, and budget cap. We normalise four inputs and take a weighted sum:

Academic quality

45%

DSIB rating, 0–5. Outstanding = 5, Weak = 1.

Commute distance

30%

Great-circle kilometres from your pin. Not zone buckets.

Fee affordability

20%

Published tuition for your child's year group, normalised against your cap.

Curriculum match

5%

Binary. 1 if it matches your filter, 0 if not.

Weights are fixed defaults. If the defaults don’t match your family, use /decide to slide them and see the list re-rank live.

Ties are broken by rating desc, then distance asc, then name asc — deterministic, reproducible.

02 · Real annual cost

Tuition is not the price. The real cost is.

Every school publishes a tuition number. Almost none publish what a parent actually pays. We add back the six categories KHDA requires schools to disclose:

• — Transport (bus route fee, annual)
• — Books and learning materials
• — Uniform
• — After-school activities (estimate)
• — Meals (optional, where offered)
• — KHDA Knowledge Dirham government levy

Where the school’s KHDA fact sheet publishes the category, we use the published figure. Where it doesn’t, we fall back to a documented Dubai median. Every real cost on this site is labelled exact or estimated, never silently mixed.

03 · Data sourcing

Sourced from KHDA. Not scraped from reviews.

KHDA Open Data API

We hit webapi.khda.gov.ae/opendata for per-grade, per-curriculum tuition and refresh quarterly. Last refresh: 23 Apr 2026.

KHDA inspection reports

The DSIB rating (Outstanding → Very Weak) comes from KHDA’s annual published inspection reports. Not our opinion, not a star aggregator, not a review score.

Coordinates

Latitude and longitude per school are WGS-84 decimal degrees, verified against KHDA-published addresses. 211 of 212 schools have verified coordinates; distances for the rest fall back to locality centroids.

04 · What we do not do

The things we refuse.

• No paid placement. Schools cannot buy their way up the ranking. Not this year, not ever.
• No sponsored “featured” schools. Every school on this site is ranked purely by the algorithm above.
• No referral kickbacks. We don’t get paid when you enrol.
• No scraping of parent reviews. Reviews are gameable. The DSIB rating is not.
• No selling your pin. Your location is used to compute distances client-side and passed nowhere else.

Coverage

212 KHDA-registered private schools indexed · 195 with a current DSIB rating · 211 with verified coordinates.