Tuition Increases During Your Programme in Canada: The Fee-Guarantee Question

Ask most South African families budgeting for a Canadian diploma or degree what happens to the fee in year two, and you’ll usually get the same answer: “It’s whatever we were quoted when we enrolled.” It’s a reasonable guess. Whether tuition increases during your programme in Canada can actually reach you, though, is something to check rather than assume.

What the national numbers actually show

Statistics Canada’s most recent figures, published in September 2025 for the 2025/26 academic year, put average international undergraduate tuition at $41,746, up 2.5% on the year before. Domestic undergraduate tuition rose more gently, to $7,734, up 1.4%. Those are national averages across every institution and every entering cohort combined — but they prove one thing beyond doubt: tuition, in aggregate, is not frozen. Somewhere in that average, real students are paying more this year than they did last year for the same programme.

Whether that applies to you specifically

Here’s the honest answer: it depends entirely on your institution, and Cape2Canada’s research doesn’t support a single Canada-wide claim either way. Some institutions publish a fee guarantee — a written commitment that your cohort’s rate won’t rise for the normal length of your specific programme. Others simply re-set international fees annually for everyone, continuing students included, which is exactly the kind of practice that produces a national average that climbs every year.

Whether a college can raise fees after you enrol, in other words, is really a question about your specific offer of admission and your specific institution’s tuition policy — not a rule true across the country. It’s worth finding that answer in writing rather than assuming either version.

Budgeting for the version where nobody guarantees anything

If your institution doesn’t offer a fixed-fee guarantee, the sensible planning move is to budget as if the fee will move roughly in line with recent national trends rather than assume four flat years at the number on your acceptance letter. Applied illustratively — not as a forecast, just to show the shape of the risk — a $41,746 fee rising at something like the 2025/26 national rate of 2.5% a year, compounded across a four-year degree, adds up to several thousand dollars more than four years at the sticker price. Treat that as a reason to build slack into the budget, not as a prediction of what your actual institution will do.

A separate, related question worth knowing

This is a different issue from what happens if you become a permanent resident partway through your programme. PR status alone qualifies you for the much lower domestic rate — no extra residency period required for the tuition rate itself — but fees aren’t adjusted retroactively. You have to present your Confirmation of Permanent Residence to the institution by its own term deadline. Miss it, and you pay the international rate for that entire term regardless of your new status. It’s a completely separate mechanism from annual fee escalation, and worth diarising the moment your PR comes through.

The five-minute task worth doing early

Somewhere in your first weeks on campus — or even before you land, by email — ask your institution’s registrar or international office directly: is my international tuition rate locked in for the length of my programme, and if not, how has it changed for continuing students over the past few years? Get the answer in writing and keep it. It’s a small thing to chase down, and considerably cheaper than finding out the hard way in year two.

Cape2Canada’s free guide, What It Really Costs, walks through the fuller rand-based budget this fits into, category by category.