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How Much Homeschooling Really Costs

2026-10-18 · 8 min · English

Most answers to this question are either a sales pitch or a survey average that describes nobody. Here is the arithmetic instead, including the places where the honest recommendation is to not buy from us.

We are not going to quote you a national average. Any number we could give you would be invented, and the real range runs from almost nothing to more than private school tuition depending on choices you have not made yet.

The six things that actually cost money

1. Curriculum. Usually the first thing families think about and rarely the biggest number. It ranges from free to several hundred dollars a year per student depending on whether you buy a boxed all-in-one program, assemble subjects yourself, or use free and library material.

2. Printing and consumables. The cost nobody budgets. Paper, ink, a binder per student, pencils, dividers. If you are using printable materials, work out what your own printer actually costs per page before you commit to printing a hundred-page workbook per subject per student. Black and white instead of color cuts it substantially, and most printable curriculum, including ours, is designed to survive that.

3. Testing and evaluation. In states with annual evaluations or standardized testing requirements, this is a real line item every single year, paid to an evaluator or a testing service. It is also the one families forget until the month it is due.

4. Outside classes and activities. Co-ops, sports, music lessons, art class, a community college class later on. This is almost always the largest number in a homeschool budget, and it is the one with the least to do with academics. It is also entirely elective.

5. Tutoring. The expensive fallback when a subject stalls. Our founder's own experience is why this company exists: a local tutor quoted him $600 a month for one subject, plus hours in the car each week, and across tutors, programs and activities he was spending thousands a month on three students. When he asked about enrolling a second or a third one, the answer was always the same — that will be double, that will be triple.

6. Your time. Not a line in a budget, but it is the real currency. The cheapest curriculum in the world costs the most hours, because free material has to be found, sequenced, checked and assembled by you. Decide deliberately which of the two you have more of.

Where we sit

Everything we publish is kindergarten through grade 5, in nine subjects, in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Two things are worth pointing out because they are the decisions we made deliberately.

We do not charge per student. The subscription covers up to ten students in a household, and a printable workbook you bought for your eldest prints again for the next one. This is the whole reason the company exists, so it is not a promotion.

The per-grade bundle is priced below four separate workbooks. If you only need one year, buy the year. If you are going to be homeschooling for several years, the subject bundle or Full Access costs less over time. Run the arithmetic on your own situation rather than ours — the pricing section lists what is in each.

Where we are not the cheapest

This is the part that sales pages leave out.

If your budget is genuinely zero, do not buy from us. A library card, free public-domain readers, and the free material your state education department publishes will get a K–5 student through a year. It costs you planning time instead of money. For a family in a tight year, that is the correct trade, and we would rather say so than take $39 from someone who should keep it.

A full-time virtual public school is free. If your state offers one and your reason for homeschooling is flexibility rather than control over content, that is free schooling with a teacher attached. We are a publisher; we cannot compete with free, and we are not a school.

Used curriculum is cheaper than new. Homeschool swap groups, local co-op sales and used-book sites move last year's materials at a fraction of retail. Our printable books cannot be resold to you secondhand because they are files, so that whole market is a genuine advantage for print publishers over us.

If you need one topic, not a year, a workbook is overkill. We sell one grade of one subject as the smallest unit. If your student has one shaky week on borrowing across zeros, free worksheets will fix that for nothing. Buy a workbook when you need a sequence, not a patch.

If your student is in grade 6 or above, we have nothing for you. Kindergarten through grade 5 is the whole catalog. No middle school, no high school, no test prep. If someone sends you here for an eighth-grader, they were wrong.

Full Access is a real $1,199. For a family with one student who will be done with grade 5 in two years, the arithmetic almost certainly favors buying the two years you need. It makes sense for households with several students and years of runway, and it does not make sense for everyone. We would rather you work that out before you buy than ask for it back after.

A sensible first year, costed

If you want one concrete plan rather than a menu:

1. Spend nothing first. The first topic of every grade in every subject is free, and so is a sample workbook. Teach two of them. You will learn more in eighty minutes than from any amount of reading about curriculum.
2. Buy the one subject that is actually causing trouble. $9.99 for the workbook, or $12 a month online. For most families that is math.
3. Budget the printing honestly. Paper, ink and a binder per student. Print in black and white.
4. Put the evaluation fee in the calendar in September, not in March, if your state requires one.
5. Add subjects only when the first one is running smoothly. If you reach four subjects, the All Subjects plan at $39 is cheaper than four at $12, and we will put you on the cheaper one and tell you we did.
6. Keep the records as you go. Not a cost, but the thing that saves a bad week later. The record-keeping pack and the scope-and-sequence documents are there for that.

And one honest caveat about the fear

The most expensive thing in homeschooling is not a curriculum. It is the belief that your student is one unpurchased program away from falling behind. That belief is what sells boxed sets, app subscriptions, supplementary workbooks and tutoring packages on top of all of it, and it is sold with fear rather than with evidence.

A student with one well-sequenced subject taught properly is in better shape than a student with six half-finished programs bought in a panic. Spend less than you are being told to, and spend it on the thing that is actually broken.

Before anything else, do the free part: the first topic of every grade in every subject, and a sample workbook, at no cost. Then price out only what you need on the store, compare the plans in the pricing section, and read the FAQ if you want the terms stated plainly before you decide.