TOEFL Fee by Country: What the Test Actually Costs Where You Live

Pick your testing location below. The receipt on the right starts with that country's registration fee and adds only the service fees you tick, so the number at the bottom is what a whole application season costs rather than what the booking page shows on screen one. Every registration figure comes from the fee table ETS publishes on its own registration site, read on 8 September 2026.

Three separate things stack on top of each other, and only the first one appears in search results.

The registration fee is the per-location list price. ETS publishes it under a column literally headed "Test Fee (USD)". It buys one test appointment, your scores in your ETS account, a downloadable PDF score report, your MyBest scores, and up to four score reports sent to institutions you name before you test.

Tax is separate in 38 named jurisdictions. The 2026–2027 TOEFL iBT Information Bulletin describes fees there as "exclusive of any sales, use, value-added or similar taxes", added when the order is placed. Everywhere else the published price already includes any tax ETS is responsible for.

Service fees are flat US dollar amounts that do not vary by country: $49 to register inside the 7-day window, $69 to reschedule, $29 for each score report past the fourth. Those are the ones that quietly double a budget.

The spread across locations is wide and has nothing to do with how hard the test is. Switzerland at $475 is 2.8 times Nigeria and Ukraine at $170 for an identical exam. If you hold two passports or study abroad, the country you sit the test in is a real financial variable.

The TOEFL iBT Information Bulletin for 2026–2027 names 38 jurisdictions where the published fee excludes sales tax, use tax or VAT, and the tax is added when the order is placed. In every other location the published price is inclusive of any tax ETS collects.

A worked example: the listed price versus the charged price

Take the United States. ETS lists $270. The United States is on the tax list, so sales tax is calculated at checkout against the address on your ETS account, not against the test centre. A student registering from a state with no sales tax on services pays $270. ETS publishes no rate table for this, so the following is arithmetic rather than a quoted price: at a local rate of 8 percent that same $270 order settles at $291.60, and at 20 percent VAT it settles at $324. Any site that prints a single "$270 plus tax" total has picked a rate out of the air. The only place the real figure appears is the order summary before you press pay.

The one contradiction worth knowing about: the ETS fee page carries a footnote saying prices exclude tax "except for EU countries", while the Bulletin lists 27 EU member states among the jurisdictions where tax is added at checkout. Those two statements point in opposite directions. Treat the checkout screen as the authority and read the order summary line by line before confirming.

Unlike the registration fee, these do not move with your location. ETS publishes them once, in US dollars, on the TOEFL iBT test fees page.

Your fee entitles you to four score reports sent to recipients you name before you sit the test. Applying to more than four programmes means paying $29 per extra recipient. This is the single most common budgeting mistake, because the four free slots have a hard deadline: 10pm local test centre time on the day before your test. Miss it and every report costs $29, including ones you would have got free an hour earlier.

Example: a student applying to ten US graduate programmes

This is an illustration, not a real person. Anjali is testing in India, where ETS lists the fee at $173. She books inside the 7-day window because a deadline moved, reschedules once when a family event lands on her test date, and only finalises her programme list after she has already tested, so all ten score reports have to be ordered afterwards.

The headline number was $173. The season cost $465, which is 2.7 times the figure she budgeted for. Not one dollar of the difference bought a better score. Had she named all ten recipients before the deadline, four would have been free and six would still have cost $174, so the reports were unavoidable; the $118 of express and reschedule fees were not.

If you are stacking this against the rest of an application season, the graduate school application cost calculator puts test fees next to application fees and transcript charges, and the college cost comparison calculator does the same for undergraduate offers.

There is no cap on attempts, but you cannot test more than once in any 3-day period. Each attempt is a fresh full registration fee. There is no returning-candidate discount anywhere in the ETS fee schedule.

The arithmetic in three common locations, one attempt against two, with no extras at all:

Two things change that calculus. First, MyBest scores combine your highest section scores across all valid tests from the last two years, so a second sitting aimed at one weak section can lift the profile a university sees without repeating your strong sections' results. Check whether your target programmes accept MyBest before you count on it; many do not. Second, a second attempt costs the fee again and a second round of score reports if your first four went out on the first test. That is why the receipt above lets you set attempts and reports independently.

Before you pay for a retake, work out whether you actually need the higher number. Our page on what TOEFL score you need lists the ranges programmes ask for, and the TOEFL iBT format and timing guide shows where the sections are worth practising instead of re-buying.

A straight price table across the four tests does not exist, because only ETS publishes a single global list. The others are priced in ways that make a scraped comparison chart wrong within weeks, which is why most of the fee comparison tables you find are stale. Here is how each one is actually set, checked on 8 September 2026.

We are not printing dollar figures for IELTS, PTE or the Duolingo English Test here. Every number we could find for them came from an aggregator rather than the operator's own page, and a fee we cannot open at source is a fee we will not quote. Open the three official links in the sources list, enter your own country, and write down what each one actually charges you today. That takes about four minutes and beats any table.

One TOEFL comparison we can make with confidence: TOEFL Essentials at $199 is cheaper than the TOEFL iBT in 194 of the 210 locations ETS lists, dearer in 13, and an exact tie at $199 in Bolivia, Indonesia and Malaysia. The 13 places where the iBT is the cheaper ETS product are Nigeria and Ukraine ($170), India ($173), Egypt and Kazakhstan ($175), Vietnam ($182), Ethiopia and Turkey ($185), and Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan ($195). Check acceptance first: far fewer institutions take Essentials than take the iBT.

If price is one input among several, our comparisons of TOEFL versus IELTS and which English test to take weigh format and acceptance alongside cost, and the Duolingo English Test score chart shows how its scale maps onto TOEFL numbers.

One official programme exists, and it is narrow. The TOEFL Fee Reduction Service covers 50 percent of the regular test fee and is designed for high school seniors in the United States with financial need who are applying to colleges where TOEFL scores are recommended or required. ETS publishes the guidelines and a voucher request form as PDFs on the fee page. On the US fee of $270 that voucher is worth $135.

Outside that programme, ETS runs occasional promotional offers, and the Bulletin warns that some products and services are excluded from discounts and promotions. There is no student discount, no bulk rate, and no loyalty pricing for repeat test takers.

Where the money actually is

1. Not needing a second attempt. Worth a full registration fee, $170 to $475 depending on where you test. Larger than every discount ETS offers combined.
2. Filling all four free score report slots before the 10pm deadline. Worth $116 against ordering the same four afterwards.
3. Booking more than 7 full days ahead. Worth $49.
4. Getting the date right the first time. Worth $69.
5. Skipping Express Scoring. Worth $129, unless a deadline genuinely falls inside the normal 3-day posting window.

Add those up for a student who plans well: $363 of avoidable service fees before you even count the second registration fee. That is more than the list price of the test in most of the world.

Published fees change mid-year, and the Bulletin states that its policies are subject to change without notice. The list on this page is a snapshot taken on 8 September 2026. Confirm yours at source before you budget:

1. Open the ETS TOEFL iBT test fees page, linked in the sources below.
2. Find the box headed "TOEFL iBT Test Registration Fee".
3. Choose your testing location in the dropdown. Choose the country where you will physically sit the test, not the country you hold a passport for or the country you are applying to.
4. Read the figure in the "Test Fee (USD)" column. That is the list price.
5. Check whether your country appears in the tax list further up this page. If it does, expect the checkout total to be higher than the list price.
6. Take the registration flow as far as the order summary without paying. The order summary is the only screen that shows tax and currency conversion for your actual account.

One caution about currency. ETS bills in US dollars and the fee table is headed "Test Fee (USD)". Any rupee, renminbi or euro figure you see quoted for the TOEFL iBT is somebody's conversion, not an ETS price. The only local currency figure ETS itself publishes anywhere in this family of tests is INR 17,200 for TOEFL Essentials in India. So a search for TOEFL price India returns dozens of confident rupee numbers, and none of them are the published fee: the published fee is $173, and what leaves your bank depends on your card's exchange rate and any foreign transaction fee. The same is true for TOEFL cost China, where the ETS list shows $283.17, an odd figure that is itself the result of a currency conversion into the USD list.

If you have not booked yet, our TOEFL registration walkthrough covers the account setup, deadlines and fee traps in order, so you hit this fee page with the rest of the process already mapped out.