Getting into Harvard University is no easy feat. But if you do earn admission to the prestigious Ivy League school, you may qualify to attend for free.
Beginning in the 2025-26 school year, tuition at Harvard College — the university’s undergraduate school — will be free for students from families earning $200,000 or less a year, the college announced Monday.
“Harvard has long sought to open our doors to the most talented students, no matter their financial circumstances,” Hopi Hoekstra, Harvard’s dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, said in a statement. “This investment in financial aid aims to make a Harvard College education possible for every admitted student, so they can pursue their academic passions and positively impact our future.”
The announcement may be a huge relief for some families; tuition costs $56,550 for the 2024-25 school year. But there are other expenses some of those families will still have to cover, such as housing, supplies and travel, which are estimated to cost around $26,000 a year.
Families earning $100,000 a year or less, however, will be able to send their student to Harvard completely for free. Students from those families can also get a $2,000 start-up grant their first year and another grant of the same size during their junior year to help begin their transition out of college.
Harvard is the oldest operating university in the United States and its undergraduate school boasts a number of notable alumni and former students, including former presidents like John F. Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and business leaders like YouTube’s former CEO Susan Wojcicki and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
The university has one of the largest academic endowments in the world at a valuation of over $53 billion as of 2024, according to the school, which helps support its student aid initiatives.
Since 2004, Harvard has offered free tuition to families earning below a certain threshold, which has risen several times. Most recently, the threshold was raised to $85,000 a year in 2023, per the school. The university also eliminated loans as a part of its financial aid packages in 2007, replacing them with grants that don’t need to be repaid.
Still, just under 5% of Harvard’s student body comes from households in the bottom 20% of U.S. household incomes, while nearly 40% of students are from the top 5% of earners, according to data from Harvard’s Opportunity Insights initiative.
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