There is no universal figure. The amount depends on when each child needs the money, how fast those fees rise, what your investment earns, and how much you intend to pre-fund.
Every year, the school fee letter arrives, and the increase outpaces your salary increase. The contribution that felt comfortable when the first child started school now covers a smaller share of the bill.
So how much do you actually need to invest to stay ahead of it? There is no universal figure. The amount depends on four things about your situation, and most plans fail because no one deliberately set one of the four.
Enough to cover what the fees will cost when they fall due, which will be different from what they cost today.
The four inputs are:
Get all four in front of you, and the number follows. Assume any one of them and the plan quietly drifts.
For each child, map the years until they start and finish each phase, including tertiary study and any realistic extra year. Education isn't one liability. Instead, it's a series of them with different dates and very different amounts, so a single pooled contribution usually suits none of them.
A child's cost doesn't rise in a straight line. It steps up at each phase. Primary school adds uniforms, sport and activities to the fee. High school adds coaching, tours, tutors, specialised equipment, and pocket money, and for some families a hostel, so the annual cost is well above primary even when fees are similar. University steps up again: higher fees, accommodation, travel, and the living costs of a young adult, often followed by help with a first car or starting a career. Each step also brings lump sums that fall due in a specific month: a laptop, a tour, a residence deposit. Map the phases and the lump sums for each child, not just the fees, and budget for the step, not the slope.
Use the published increase history of the institutions you have in mind. Stats SA surveys education costs once a year, so the national figure is a baseline. An assumption that's a couple of percentage points light doesn't make the answer slightly wrong; it makes it substantially wrong by the final year.
This is your return after fees, taxes and platform costs, and not what the fund's headline number says. Where the horizon is long enough, a tax-free savings account can carry part of this, within the annual and lifetime contribution limits. It's the only one of the four you have any real influence over. Money you need in three years can't carry the risk required to keep pace with fee increases, so don't structure it as though it can. Money needed in fifteen can, and wasting that horizon in a cautious structure is the most expensive mistake available here, because it's invisible and it runs for the whole period.
Most families don't pre-fund everything. School fees are often met from monthly income as they fall due, with the investment reserved for the peaks: the high-school years, the tertiary years, and any period when two or three children overlap. Assuming you have to pre-fund every rand of every year produces a figure most households can't meet and never needed to.
Timing then matters more than the monthly amount. Money invested when a child is four has fourteen years to grow. The same money contributed at fourteen has four years to grow. That's why a plan started early can get away with a smaller contribution, and why starting late can rarely be fixed by contributing more.
A couple with three children, one each in nursery, primary, and high school, split a single education contribution evenly between them and invested it in one cautious structure. It had increased with inflation each year and felt adequate. The fee letters said otherwise.
Mapping the costs to the calendar showed what the flat contribution had hidden. The eldest was two years from university, so her biggest cost jump was still ahead: fees, residence, travel and living costs, plus a deposit and a laptop in the first year. The middle child was about to start high school, where coaching, tours and sports equipment would lift the annual cost well above primary, with two of those items due in the same term. The youngest had well over a decade of growth ahead, yet his share was invested the same way as his sister's, in a structure suited to a short horizon.
The plan was rebuilt as a stepped budget, with each child's costs mapped by phase and year, and the lump sums listed separately from the fees. The youngest's portion moved to a structure suited to his horizon. The eldest's stayed conservative and was topped up from cash flow for the two years before university. The contribution was set to escalate each year at the schools' and university's published increases, and the parents committed to that escalation in advance rather than deciding it each January.
Two further changes followed. The savings had been held in the children's names, so the eldest would have had full access to her portion at eighteen, whatever the plan said. Future contributions now go into the parents' names, and the parents accepted that each child can keep what's already in their name. And because their income would cover the youngest's school fees from cash flow by the time he reached high school, his portion is now reserved for his tertiary years, with anything not needed available for the parents' retirement or to give him later.
The tertiary assumption for the eldest was also revisited. It had been absorbed from the people around them and never actually chosen. Settling it deliberately changed the number more than any investment decision did.
Write down the four inputs for each child and mark which ones you've calculated and which you've assumed. The assumed ones are where the plan is most likely to be wrong.
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