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Mandatory fees

Charges every enrolled student pays on top of tuition. Excluding them makes a college look cheaper than it is.

Mandatory fees cover technology, health services, athletics, transport and student activities, and they are not optional in any meaningful sense. At some public universities they add several thousand dollars a year to the headline tuition figure.

Figures on this site are tuition plus mandatory fees, because that is the number a student is actually billed. They exclude housing, food, books and course-specific differentials.

Differential tuition is the other trap: engineering, nursing and business programs frequently carry a per-credit surcharge that no published headline rate includes.

See also

Non-resident tuitionAll termsResidency rules by state

Asked and answered

›What does "mandatory fees" mean for in-state tuition?

Charges every enrolled student pays on top of tuition. Excluding them makes a college look cheaper than it is.

›Why does mandatory fees matter?

Figures on this site are tuition plus mandatory fees, because that is the number a student is actually billed. They exclude housing, food, books and course-specific differentials.

How this page was made

Compiled and checked by Billy Reiner, editor of In-State Check. Last verified 2026-09-27.

Compiled from published rate pages
Every dollar figure on this site is tuition and mandatory fees for one full-time year, read from the named reference institution’s own 2025–26 rate page and rounded to the nearest $100. Housing, books, travel and course-specific differentials are not included in them.
Checked against the administering body
Compact membership is checked against the commission that runs each program (WICHE, MHEC, SREB and NEBHE), and every residency rule against the issuing state authority or statute. Nothing here is taken from another comparison site.

Not advice. In-State Check is independent of every college, compact and state agency named here. Residency classification and award decisions are made by the institution you apply to. Found an error? Send the page URL and the source that contradicts it to [email protected], and the page is corrected and re-dated. Full methodology.