College calculators
Saving for education costs that are years out.
College money has two separate questions behind it: what you will have saved, and what you will be given. They run on completely different machinery. Saving is compound interest and you control the inputs. Aid is a formula set by statute that you do not. These two calculators take one each, and neither of them tries to guess what college will cost by the time you get there.
2 calculators
- Pell Grant An estimate from the Student Aid Index on your FAFSA summary.
- 529 calculator What regular contributions grow to by the first tuition bill.
What every college calculator here assumes
These apply across the cluster. Each page repeats the ones that bear on its own result, so you never have to come back here to read a figure.
- Statutory figures are inputs, not constants
- The maximum Pell award and the annual lending limits change. They are fields with documented defaults rather than numbers buried in code, so a stale figure is visible and editable instead of silent.
- No projection of college costs
- Tuition inflation over eighteen years compounds a guess on top of a guess. These pages tell you what you will have, not what it will buy.
- Aid formulas run in statutory order
- The order the steps are applied in changes the answer, so these follow the Federal Student Aid Handbook rather than a simplified version of it.
What they deliberately leave out
Every exclusion here is a real cost or a real rule. They are left out because including them would need information this site does not have, and a figure built on a guess is worth less than a figure with a stated gap.
- Computing your Student Aid Index, which depends on income, assets, family size and tax data, and is produced by the FAFSA itself.
- State grants, institutional aid and scholarships, which are awarded on their own terms.
- Plan fees and state tax deductions, both of which vary by state and by plan.
- Loans. Nothing here models borrowing for education.