Method: how each figure is built

Every school figure on this site was read in a document the school publishes: its fees page, its student budget, its class profile or its employment report. Each figure keeps its link, the class or intake it describes and the day we read it. This page explains how those figures become a total cost, a payback period, a ten-year net present value and our ranking, and which assumptions you can change.

1. Putting schools on the same footing

Schools publish in different shapes. Some give tuition for the whole program, others for one academic year; some give a budget for nine months, others for twelve. We turn everything into a whole-program figure and say how on the school page: an annual figure of a two-year program counts twice, a twelve-month budget of a sixteen-month program is scaled to sixteen months. 12 of the 75 schools needed such a step. When a British school gives no living budget, we use the monthly amount UK Visas and Immigration requires students to hold (£1,529 in London, £1,171 elsewhere), for each month of the program, and the page calls it a floor (today: LBS). Elsewhere a missing budget stays missing.

Some official pages refuse automated reading. Their figures were read in a browser on the school's own page or report, on the date shown, and kept in a separate file per school with the link (research/overrides); they take precedence over older copies.

Amounts are converted to US dollars at the euro reference rates of the European Central Bank of October 13, 2026, crossed through the euro. Conversion at market rates does not equalize living standards: a salary in rupees or yuan looks small in dollars and goes further at home, which is why the calculators work for one person at a time, with their own salary.

2. Which salary

Most schools follow the MBA CSEA reporting standards and publish a median base salary of graduates who accepted a full-time job, without signing bonus. Some publish an average (London Business School, Oxford, several Asian schools) and a few an average of total pay (IMD). We never convert one into the other: the kind of figure is written next to it in every table, and an average tends to sit above the median of the same class. A monthly survey figure that is not a base salary (Hong Kong's graduate employment survey, for example) is shown on the school page and left out of the comparisons. A few schools publish their salaries in purchasing-power-parity dollars (Warwick, Imperial, Rotterdam): we turn them back into the school's own currency with the World Bank 2025 PPP conversion factor, then into US dollars at the market rate like every other school, so that a PPP figure is never compared with a market-rate one. Salaries by industry, segment or region are used when the school gives them; otherwise the school-wide salary is used and marked with an asterisk.

3. Total cost

Total cost C = tuition + mandatory fees + living budget + the salary you give up during the program − scholarship − summer internship pay. The salary given up is your current salary times the length of the program in years (21 months = 1.75 years). Internship pay is counted for two-year programs only, as the school's median monthly internship pay times 2.5 months. A loan, when you enter one in the payback calculator, adds its interest to C.

4. Payback and net present value

The gain of year t after graduation is the salary after the MBA, growing 5% a year, minus the salary you would have earned without it, growing 3% a year from today; the signing bonus, times the share of the class that received one, is added in the first year. The payback period is the number of years, interpolated in months, until the sum of these gains reaches C. The net present value counts the costs paid during the program and the gains up to 10 years after the first day of class, discounted at 5% a year. Results are before tax: a tax rate cuts gains and payback alike, so it changes the size of the result more than the order of schools.

Example, Wharton, for a person earning $90,000 today: tuition $175,940 and the school's living budget $84,866 for two years, salary given up $157,500, median base salary $185,000 for the class of 2025. Total cost $402,342; payback 3.9 years after graduation; ten-year net present value $312,208.

5. Our ranking for a goal

For a goal (consulting, investment banking, technology, working in Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East…), each school gets three measures from its own report: the share of the class placed there, the salary reported for it, and the ten-year net present value of the MBA for the same reference person ($90,000 today) with that salary. Each measure becomes a percentile rank among the schools that publish all three, and the fit score is their weighted average: share 40%, salary 30%, net present value 30%. A school missing one measure is listed apart and not ranked. "About N graduates" is the share applied to the class size the school publishes. The finder recomputes everything on your own salary and lets you sort on any single measure instead.

No rank from the Financial Times, QS, US News or Bloomberg enters the calculation, and none of their columns is reproduced. A school page may quote one of those ranks as a fact, with its link.

6. Shares by region

Schools cut the world differently. We group their lines into the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Oceania, keep the school's own label in brackets, and never add two lines that overlap (a "Europe" line and a "Switzerland" line inside it). "Working in Europe" adds continental Europe and the United Kingdom. A line covering the Middle East and Africa together is counted under the Middle East and labelled as such.

7. Career pages

The consulting, finance and technology pages combine what schools report for those industries with the occupational wages of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (May 2025), which cover all employers and all levels and therefore sit below post-MBA pay at the large firms. Firms do not publish their salary grids; where no public figure exists, the calculator asks for yours rather than inventing one.

Limits

A report describes one past class, mostly people who chose to seek a job and answered the survey; sponsored students and founders are usually outside the salary figure. Your offer, your visa and your scholarship decide your own result. Corrections: contact page. Who we are: about.