University Application Fees: Who Charges, Who Does Not

What an application costs before tuition

An application fee is separate from tuition. It is paid whether or not the applicant is admitted, it is usually non-refundable, and its size and structure say as much about how a country organises admissions as about the money itself. Some systems charge nothing. Some charge one fee nationally, collected by a shared service rather than the university. Some charge per programme, so a shortlist of five can cost five times over. This guide sets out which pattern applies where, using the fee figures this site's own university and country records carry.

Who charges nothing

A confirmed zero shows up more often than the assumption that every application costs something. Charles Darwin University in Australia states plainly that there is no application fee for its online applications (cdu.edu.au). In the Netherlands, Radboud University and Delft University of Technology both confirm no separate bachelor's application fee is charged; Delft's own pages note that tuition is simply invoiced after conditional admission rather than collected in advance (ru.nl, tudelft.nl). Johannes Kepler University Linz in Austria is more explicit still: two of its own admission pages state plainly that its general application is free (jku.at), a stronger confirmation than most Austrian universities in this dataset can offer. The University of Vienna, TU Wien, the University of Innsbruck and the University of Graz leave the question genuinely unanswered: no official page any of them publishes states that a general application fee exists or that applying is free, so this site records the field as unlisted rather than guessed. Munster Technological University in Ireland found nothing on its own fees pages and records the same zero (mtu.ie). Even the University of Cambridge, among the most selective universities in this database, charges nothing itself: this site's own research into Cambridge's admissions pages found that no application fee is charged by Cambridge beyond the standard UCAS processing fee (undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk). That finding matters. It confirms a UCAS charge exists without stating its amount on any page this site's records cite, so no figure for it appears here.

Who charges a national fee instead of a university one

Sweden is the clearest case of a fee set nationally rather than by any individual university. Every Swedish university in this database, Uppsala University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Chalmers University of Technology, Stockholm University and the rest, charges the identical SEK 900, paid to University Admissions in Sweden, the shared national service, not to the university itself. Stockholm University's own fees page states plainly that this is paid once per semester applied for, regardless of how many programmes the application lists (su.se). The fee is stable, but the tuition beside it is not: Chalmers' own fees page shows SEK 95,000 a semester for most programmes and SEK 135,000 for Industrial Design Engineering and Architecture from the 2027/2028 intake, up from SEK 80,000 and SEK 105,000 the year before, so a tuition figure copied from an older page can already be out of date by the time an applicant reads it (chalmers.se).

Ontario runs a smaller version of the same idea. The University of Toronto's own admissions record traces its CAD 156 fee to OUAC, Ontario's shared application centre, rather than a Toronto-specific charge (registrar.utoronto.ca). Four more Ontario universities in this database, Western University, the University of Waterloo, York University and Wilfrid Laurier University, list the identical CAD 156 figure, consistent with the same shared service, though not every Canadian province works this way; other Canadian universities in this database set their own separate figures, from CAD 100 at Acadia University (acadiau.ca) to CAD 300 at Memorial University of Newfoundland (mun.ca).

Who charges per programme, so five choices cost five times

Poland charges by the individual programme rather than by the application as a whole. The University of Warsaw, AGH University of Krakow, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and Warsaw University of Technology all charge PLN 85 per field of study, rising to PLN 100 where the programme requires a written or oral exam (international.agh.edu.pl). Applying to five different fields of study at one of these universities costs five separate PLN 85 payments, not one. Switzerland's universities work the same way in principle: this site's own research found "a non-refundable application fee of CHF 100 to CHF 250 per programme applied for," not per applicant (swissuniversities.ch). Boğaziçi University in Turkey charges EUR 100 per programme applied to (bogazici.edu.tr). The University of Catania in Italy charges a smaller EUR 10 non-refundable fee, but still per programme, separate from a further EUR 75 confirmation fee due within 15 days of an offer (unict.it).

Germany's central processor, uni-assist, tapers the multiplication rather than repeating it in full: EUR 75 for the first application in a semester and EUR 30 for each further one in the same semester, non-refundable regardless of outcome (uni-assist.de). Five applications through uni-assist in one semester cost EUR 75 plus four payments of EUR 30, EUR 195 in total, not five times EUR 75. The University of Erlangen-Nuremberg runs a similar taper for its own new non-EU processing fee, EUR 100 per application from winter 2026/27, but caps it at three applications, EUR 300, per person per admissions phase (fau.eu). Austrian universities show the opposite instinct where a fee exists at all: the University of Vienna charges EUR 50 for its entrance or aptitude procedure once per programme group, not once per programme, so several programmes in the same group cost EUR 50 in total rather than EUR 50 each (aufnahmeverfahren.univie.ac.at).

What the fee depends on, beyond the country

A fee is not always one flat number set and left alone. The Medical University of Warsaw charges EUR 24 for its Competency Test route and EUR 20 for the Medical Standardised Test Score or university GPA routes, so the figure depends on which admission path an applicant takes, not on the university alone (ed.wum.edu.pl). Sabancı University in Turkey charges USD 30 for an undergraduate application and nothing for a graduate one (iro.sabanciuniv.edu). Japan's national universities mostly converge on the same JPY 17,000 undergraduate entrance examination fee, confirmed at the University of Tokyo, but not always: Kyoto University's special English-taught programme charges JPY 9,800, and Hokkaido University's own English-taught route charges JPY 5,000, both lower, by Hokkaido's own account, than its general undergraduate examination fee, because each runs a separate admissions track (u-tokyo.ac.jp, kyoto-u.ac.jp, oia.hokudai.ac.jp). Private Japanese universities charge more: Sophia University and Keio University both charge JPY 35,000, roughly double the national rate (sophia.ac.jp, keio.ac.jp).

When "no figure" does not mean "no fee"

New Zealand is a useful caution. None of the eight New Zealand universities in this database carries a stated application fee figure, University of Auckland included (auckland.ac.nz). That is not the same claim this guide makes about Charles Darwin University, Radboud University or Johannes Kepler University Linz, where an official page states in words that there is no fee. In New Zealand's case, no page read for any of the eight universities said either that a fee exists or that applying is free, so the field stays blank rather than being recorded as a confirmed zero. An absence in a database is not evidence of a free application; it is only evidence that nobody has yet found the page that answers the question.

Before listing five programmes

Whether an application fee multiplies matters more than its size. A EUR 10 Catania fee charged five times over costs more than a EUR 50 Vienna fee charged once for a comparable shortlist within one group, and Sweden's flat SEK 900 covers a full list of choices in a single payment. Before assuming a shortlist of five simply multiplies the number on the page, check whether the fee is charged per application, per programme or per applicant, and whether it is collected by the university itself or by a national service standing behind it.