The College’s comprehensive fee, which encompasses tuition, housing, meals, and mandatory student fees, will total $95,960 for the 2026-27 academic year. This represents an increase of 5.7 percent from 2025-2026, Vice President for Finance and Operations Mike Wagner and Provost Eiko Maruko Siniawer ’97 announced in an email to first-year, sophomore, and junior students on March 20. Over the 2025-2026 academic year, the College also increased its tuition by 5.7 percent.

The College’s all-grant financial aid policy will remain unchanged. “We never want the cost to prevent students from attending,” Wagner wrote in the March 20 email. “We understand that paying for college is a significant and meaningful investment in your future.”

According to Siniawer and Wagner, the increase in tuition is due to inflation and increased employee benefit costs, among other factors. “For 2026-2027, these considerations include trends in the costs of providing an exceptional liberal arts education as well as co-curricular experiences, investing in Williams faculty and staff, funding strategic initiatives, and maintaining and improving campus facilities,” Siniawer and Wagner wrote in an email to the Record.

Siniawer and Wagner emphasized the vital role of net tuition — the sum tuition total that students pay after student aid — in the College’s finances, as it supports more than 25 percent of the College’s annual operating revenues. The comprehensive fee does not cover the entire cost of running the College, as the budget allocates more than $140,000 per student — subsidizing even those who pay full tuition.

This comprehensive fee increase comes after the College announced last November that, beginning in the 2027-28 academic year, students will pay Williams tuition for any semester they chose to study away. The College will pay abroad programs’ tuition — which is often significantly lower than the College’s  — and keep the difference. This announcement came after the College faced increasing financial challenges, which Wagner stated in his presentation during a Nov. 2024 faculty meeting.

When determining increases in tuition costs, Siniawer and Wagner examine the publicly available information about the comprehensive fee at peer institutions. “We examine how our comprehensive fee increases compare to those of peer institutions,” they wrote.

Last August, the College was sued in a lawsuit alleging price-fixing in the early decision admissions process. In a follow-up to their initial email, Siniawer and Wagner emphasized that antitrust laws do not prohibit market participants from using publicly available information to confirm whether their prices are competitive. “This is common across competitive markets, including colleges and universities, which compete vigorously for students,” Siniawer and Wagner wrote. “Williams absolutely does not have any agreement with other schools about how prices are set.”

The College’s comprehensive fee for the 2026-27 academic year remains slightly lower than that of peer institutions, including Middlebury and Amherst. The College will continue to examine trends in other sources of operating revenue and their impact on net tuition, Siniawer and Wagner wrote.