Key takeaways
- Published 2026 prices in this market run from about S$300 for a single strategy session to US$200,000 for a multi-year package. Most families do not need anything near the top of that range.
- The large global firms publish almost nothing. Independent reporting puts the typical package at around US$30,000, with a stated range of US$25,000 to US$200,000.
- A boutique Singapore consultancy will quote roughly S$1,800 for full UCAS application support, which is a useful sanity-check number to hold in your head.
- Price correlates far more strongly with how the firm is structured than with how good your consultant is. You are frequently paying for a sales team and an office, not for expertise.
- The single most useful question to ask is not "how much" but "who exactly will sit with my child every week, and what did they get into".
This is the question every family in Singapore asks first and almost nobody answers straight. Search for admissions consulting prices and you will find pages of marketing copy, a contact form, and no numbers. That opacity is deliberate, and it is worth understanding before you spend anything.
So here are the actual numbers, as published in 2026, along with what each tier genuinely buys.
The four price tiers, with real numbers
Tier 1: the single session, S$250 to S$500
One conversation with an experienced consultant, usually sixty minutes. One Singapore-based consultancy serving international and expat families publishes a rate of S$299 for a sixty-minute strategy session, on top of a free thirty-minute discovery call.
What it buys: a second opinion. Whether the course choice makes sense, whether the five UCAS choices are strategically arranged, whether the profile is realistic for the target. It does not buy execution. Nobody will help you write anything.
Worth it when: you basically know what you are doing and want one sanity check from someone who has seen a lot of applications.
Tier 2: boutique application support, S$1,500 to S$4,000
The same Singapore consultancy publishes S$1,800 as the base price for application support covering one applicant for one cycle, plus S$500 for each additional school system. Notably, an entire UCAS application counts as one, because UCAS is a single submission to five courses.
This is the tier most families in Singapore and Hong Kong actually need, and it is the one they are least often shown, because the firms with the biggest advertising budgets do not operate here.
What it buys: real work on the application itself. Personal statement development across multiple drafts, course and university selection, admissions test planning, interview preparation. You typically work with one person throughout.
Tier 3: the large agency package, US$25,000 to US$50,000
The global firms do not publish prices. What we have is independent reporting. Fortune reported in December 2024 that students pay upwards of US$30,000 for the best-known of these firms, and a 2026 review put the published range at US$25,000 to US$200,000 depending on package and timeline.
At current rates, US$30,000 is roughly S$40,000. For context, that is comparable to a full year of tuition at a top-tier international school in Singapore.
What it buys: a team rather than a person. Typically an academic strategist, an essay mentor, sometimes a test tutor and an extracurricular mentor. Extensive proprietary data on admissions outcomes. Genuine institutional knowledge.
What it also buys, and this is the part nobody says out loud: a share of a very large sales and marketing operation. When a firm advertises heavily, runs offices in a dozen cities and employs a commissioned sales team, those costs sit inside your fee. You are not paying for that because it helps your child. You are paying for it because it is how the firm found you.
Tier 4: the multi-year programme, US$100,000 and up
Starting in Year 9 or earlier, running to submission. Extracurricular design, research placements, competition coaching, summer programme placement, the full apparatus.
An honest assessment: at this level you are buying a managed childhood. Some families want that and can afford it. But the marginal return over Tier 3 is the weakest part of the entire market, and admissions officers are considerably better at spotting a manufactured profile than the people selling these packages will admit.
Why nobody publishes prices
There is a straightforward commercial reason. If the price is only revealed after a consultation, the consultation can be used to build enough perceived value that the number lands softly. It is a well-understood sales technique and it is not unique to this industry.
There is also a second reason, less often discussed. Prices in this market are frequently not fixed. Two families can pay materially different amounts for the same package depending on how the conversation went, how urgent the family seemed, and what the consultant judged they could pay. A published price makes that impossible.
You should treat any quoted figure as an opening position rather than a fixed rate.
What actually drives the price
Almost none of the price difference between a S$1,800 engagement and a S$40,000 one is explained by the quality of the person doing the work. What explains it is:
- Customer acquisition cost. Firms that advertise heavily must recover that spend. Education keyword advertising in Singapore runs at roughly S$3 to S$6.50 per click, and a firm may spend thousands of dollars in clicks to close a single family. That is inside your fee.
- Headcount per student. A four-person team costs four times as much to schedule as one person, whether or not four people are needed.
- Brand. A recognisable name commands a premium, exactly as it does anywhere else.
- Perceived stakes. This is the uncomfortable one. Admissions consulting is priced against parental anxiety more than against the hours of work involved. A firm knows that a family fixated on a specific university will pay a great deal to reduce that uncertainty, even where the actual work required is a handful of hours.
The five questions worth asking before you pay anything
- Who specifically will work with my child every week, and where did they get in? The person selling to you is very often not the person delivering. Ask for the name and the record of the actual consultant. If the answer is vague, that is the answer.
- How many hours of direct contact is this, and what happens between sessions? Convert the fee to an hourly rate. It is frequently clarifying.
- Do you write, or do you edit? A consultant writing a personal statement is a serious problem. UCAS screens for similarity, admissions tutors have read thousands of statements, and the whole thing collapses at interview when the student cannot defend a claim they never made. Any firm willing to write for you is telling you what it thinks of your child.
- What happens if we do not get an offer? Understand the refund position before, not after.
- What would you tell me if I did not need you? A consultant who cannot describe the family they would turn away is a salesperson.
How to work out which tier you actually need
Be honest about which of these describes your situation.
You probably need Tier 1 or nothing. Strong grades, a clear subject, a school with a functioning careers department, and a student who writes well and is self-directed. Buy one session, check the strategy, move on.
You probably need Tier 2. This covers most families. Strong or reasonable grades, but the personal statement is not working, the course choice is unsettled, an admissions test is looming, or the school counsellor covers three hundred students and knows nothing about UCAS. You need someone to do focused work on specific parts of the application. You do not need a team of four.
You might need Tier 3. A US application to highly selective universities, started early, where the extracurricular profile genuinely needs strategic development over years and the family wants the institutional data. This is a real product. It is just far more expensive than most families need.
A note on the UK specifically
UK applications are structurally cheaper to support than US ones, and this is under-appreciated in Singapore. UCAS is one form, one statement, five courses, and the assessment is overwhelmingly academic. There is no extracurricular portfolio to build over four years, no set of supplemental essays per university, no interview circuit across a dozen campuses. A family paying US-package prices for a purely UK application is very likely overpaying, and should say so out loud during the consultation.
The bottom line
For a UK application from Singapore, Hong Kong or Malaysia, most families are well served somewhere between S$300 and S$4,000, depending on how much of the application is already working. Beyond that you are buying brand, team size and advertising recovery, and you should at least know that is what you are buying.
The number that matters is not the fee. It is the fee divided by the hours of attention from a person who has actually done this recently and got in.
Where PORTICO fits in
We sit in Tier 2 deliberately, and we say so. You work directly with someone who ran this application in the most recent cycle and got a place, rather than a consultant working from a house template. We do not write anything for you, and if the scoping call shows you do not need us, we will tell you that instead of selling you a package. See the October 15 Sprint if you are applying to Oxbridge or medicine this cycle.