Before 2021, a French school leaver paid roughly what an English student pays at Bristol or Edinburgh. Since Brexit, he or she pays the international rate, somewhere between £25,000 and £48,000 a year depending on the university and the subject. Admission itself has barely moved. With 15 or 16 out of 20 in the baccalaureate (the French end-of-school diploma, the "bac") and the right subjects, many very good British universities are within reach. So the decision has shifted. Families used to ask whether their child would get in. The question now is whether this degree, for this particular student, is worth the price of a house.
The application procedures have their own pages on this site and I won't repeat them. This page compares: fee status, the real budget for a whole degree, the universities that French families mention less than London and Oxbridge, and the cases where I recommend the UK over a French prépa (the two-year preparatory classes for the grandes écoles) or the United States.
Settle fee status before you draw up the list
This is the first thing I check, because it can multiply the bill by four. An EU citizen pays the British "home" rate only with settled or pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme and, as a general rule, three years of residence before the course starts in the UK, the European Economic Area or Switzerland. The UK government notes that the deadline for that scheme was 30 June 2021 for most people, with late applications accepted only on "reasonable grounds".
For a French family, that gives three situations. A family that lived in London before the end of 2020 and applied: their child has a good chance of home status. A family living in France: international fees, no discussion. The third is the one that catches people out. A family posted to London after 2021 on a work visa has no EU status to rely on, so a child who has spent three years at the Lycée Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington will usually pay international fees. A petition on the UK Parliament website asks for home fees for exactly these children who arrived as dependants, which tells you how common the case is.
Irish citizens are treated like British ones, so a French-Irish student should say so on the UCAS form. And the university decides, not UCAS: Cambridge, for example, sends a questionnaire asking where the parents lived over the previous three years. A wrong answer can be corrected through a reassessment, but it is far better to answer accurately the first time.
What a whole degree costs, not one year
Families compare annual fees. I prefer to compare degrees, because length and annual increases reorder the ranking. The fees below are each university's published international rates. For living costs I used the amount the Home Office requires in the bank to issue a visa: £1,529 a month in London, £1,171 elsewhere, over nine months. That is a legal floor, not a comfortable budget.
I go through two readings of this chart with every family. First, St Andrews, a small Scottish town on the North Sea, costs more over the whole degree than the LSE in central London. A Scottish honours degree takes four years, and St Andrews says its fees rise every year, typically by 3 to 5%. The LSE guarantees a fixed overseas fee for the length of the programme, and Edinburgh likewise charges international students a fixed annual fee set by their year of entry. Warwick's terms and conditions warn that its overseas fees are expected to rise by 4 to 6% a year. Over three or four years, that one line of small print is worth several thousand pounds.
Second, outside London the gap comes less from tuition than from living. In Durham, St John's College charges £10,430.80 for a standard catered room over 39 weeks in 2026-27, so the £10,539 visa floor for outside London is almost entirely taken up by room and meals. Add the student visa, £558, and the immigration health surcharge, £776 per year of visa, which means at least £2,886 for a three-year degree.
There is almost no need-based financial aid for international undergraduates in Britain, a few merit scholarships aside. That is the big difference with the wealthiest American universities, which meet the demonstrated need of admitted families, foreign ones included. A family hesitating for budget reasons sometimes does well to look at both.
Beyond Oxford, Cambridge and London
Students at French lycées tend to know four or five British names. For Oxford and Cambridge, everything is in Oxford and Cambridge with the French baccalaureate; for science in London, Imperial College sets its own grades, and the social sciences comparison is in LSE and UCL. Beyond those five, several universities publish a conversion grid for the bac, and they do not say the same thing.
| University | French bac (overall /20) | BFI | Required subject | What I take from it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edinburgh | 16 for A*AA, 15 for AAA | One point lower | 17 for an A*, 15 for an A, as a spécialité in both final years | Further Maths needs maths expertes; "maths complémentaires" not accepted |
| St Andrews | 16 | 15 | 17 in required subjects, taken as spécialités in both years | The subject grade matters more than the average |
| Bristol | 15 for AAA | 14 (OIB) | 13 to 17 depending on the course, as a final-year spécialité | The technological bac is not accepted |
| Warwick | 17 for A*A*A, 16 for A*AA, 15 for AAA | Not stated | 17 for an A*, 18 in maths for its two maths degrees | The highest maths bar |
I found no published French bac grid for Durham: requirements are listed course by course on its pages and on UCAS, and the university refers unlisted cases to its European recruitment team. I would write to them before applying rather than assume an equivalence.
The detail that costs the most offers sits in the subject column. In the reformed French bac, students choose three "spécialités" (major subjects) in Year 12 and keep two in Year 13. St Andrews and Edinburgh want the required subject as a spécialité in both years; Bristol only needs Year 13. A student who dropped economics (SES) at the end of Year 12 cannot use it for an economics degree at St Andrews, even with an 18. And "maths complémentaires", the lighter option many students take when they drop the maths spécialité, never satisfies a maths requirement at Edinburgh. These choices are made at 15 and 16, an age when Scotland is rarely on anyone's mind.
A word on the BFI, the international option of the French bac. Edinburgh, St Andrews, Oxford and Imperial give students in international sections a one-point allowance; Cambridge gives none. For a student deciding whether to join an international section at the start of lycée, that is a concrete argument, provided the section is British: UCAS notes that the British BFI is widely accepted as proof of English, without a separate test.
The overall timeline, from Year 12 to the first term
A British application from a French lycée spans eighteen months. The steps repeat every year; only the exact dates change.
Step 1 is the one families miss. Universities decide on predicted grades that the school must enter, and many French lycées are not used to that; I explain how to handle it in UCAS with the French baccalaureate. The referee is therefore chosen in Year 12, not in September of Year 13. For step 2, the application essay follows codes far removed from a French cover letter, covered in the UCAS personal statement.
Step 3 is where the admissions tests sit, and they often decide more than grades. The table of tests by subject is in Oxford and Cambridge admissions tests. For a future mathematician, computer scientist or economist, the TMUA opens the most doors at once; for engineering and the sciences it is the ESAT, whose modules cannot be changed once booked. Law and medicine have their own tests, and medicine a cap on places for international students that I describe in LNAT and UCAT. For maths at Cambridge, the offer is still decided in June by STEP, in the middle of the bac exams.
Example: the cycle for September 2027 entry.
TMUA and ESAT sat from 12 to 16 October 2026. UCAS application by 15 October 2026 at 6pm UK time for Oxford, Cambridge and medicine; by 13 January 2027 for most other courses. The 2027 Parcoursup calendar is published at the end of 2026; in 2026, choices closed on 12 March and answers began on 2 June. On UCAS, for 2026 entry, an applicant whose last decision arrived by 13 May had to choose two offers by 3 June. The Graduate visa, which lets graduates stay on to work, drops from two years to eighteen months for applications made from 1 January 2027.
The June overlap is the most expensive trap. A British offer is almost always conditional on the bac grade, known in early July. Parcoursup answers arrive from June. My rule is simple: a student holding a conditional offer also keeps a Parcoursup place until the bac results. Giving up the French place in June "to keep things simple" means betting a whole year on an average that has not been written yet.
UK, prépa or the United States: how I decide
An English degree is short, three years, and specialised from day one. An economics student at Warwick does economics, maths and statistics, and nothing else. That is both its strength and its limit. I recommend it without hesitation to the student who knows what they want to study, already has 16 or 17 in the relevant subjects, and will gain more from going deep than from keeping every door open.
I advise against it for two profiles. First, the strong mathematician who does not yet know whether they want engineering, finance or research: a French prépa such as MPSI or ECG gives two years to decide, at a fraction of the cost. Second, the broad profile, with activities, scattered curiosity and grades that are good rather than dazzling: American universities read that file better than British ones, which look almost only at the subject. I compare those two systems in US universities with the French baccalaureate.
In most of the families we work with, what tips the decision is certainty about the subject. Budget comes right after. A family that can fund £110,000 but not £180,000 does not have the same list as another, and that is a question to ask before choosing universities, not when the offers arrive.
What students report
On The Student Room, when a French lycée student weighs a Warwick degree against Sciences Po, the replies talk less about tuition than about everything else: housing, transport, the cost of British student life, higher than it looks from Paris. The St Andrews threads say the same in their own way. The town is small, housing is dearer than in other university towns, while groceries cost what they cost anywhere. One parent writes that their son found a shared house at about £150 a week each plus bills, and that halls run from roughly £5,000 a year self-catered with a shared bathroom to £9,500 catered with en-suite. The university, for its part, requires students to live within commuting distance of St Andrews for the whole degree, so moving to Edinburgh to pay less is not an option.
One last, more administrative point. The student visa can be requested no earlier than six months before the course, and only after the final offer and the university's accompanying document. Families who leave it until late July discover they also have to show the funds held in an account for 28 consecutive days. Better to open that file in the spring.
Building the application
A British plan is decided before Year 13 even starts: fee status, budget over the length of the degree, spécialités that match the grids, the choice of referee, tests, and a Parcoursup strategy that holds until the bac. At Carmine, we build that list with the student and their family, prepare the tests and the personal statement with them, and stay alongside them until the choice between offers. Our admissions support page describes how we work.