What will this actually cost?
Money, not time. The answer can be zero, and for a beginner it usually should be — which is an odd thing for a site funded by course referrals to say, and is the reason this tool is here.
What this does not include
Exam fees, books you buy anyway, travel, and the thing that dominates every real budget: the months you were not studying. The figures below assume you keep going at the pace you entered, which is the least reliable assumption in the whole calculation.
Prices come from the merchant table, each recorded with the date it was checked, and they change constantly. Confirm on the merchant's own site before paying anything — the course list carries the dates.
How this is worked out
The hours come from the model. The money comes from the merchant table, where every price carries the date it was checked. Multiply the months your pace implies by what each option charges per month, and a one-off purchase shows its actual total rather than a monthly slice of it.
A one-off is amortised over twelve months internally when comparing against a budget, because a course bought once is worked through over roughly a year. That amortised figure is never displayed as a price — you are not charged $21.67 a month for a $260 course, and showing it as though you were is how a $260 course once displayed on this site as "Free".
It gives no total when the method cannot reach the level
Money does not move a ceiling inside this model. Ask what it costs to reach C1 by app and the tool applies its disclosed B1 app-only cap, so it returns the model assumption instead of presenting the pre-ceiling arithmetic as a prediction.
Every tool here can decline to answer, and that is the most useful thing they do.
Common questions
- Why is the bottom of the range zero?
- Because for most methods there is a free option that genuinely works, and it is in the results by rule rather than by generosity — every recommendation on this site must include at least one zero-commission option, enforced by a test. Anki and Language Reactor cost nothing and earn us nothing, and for a beginner who has not yet proved they will show up, spending nothing is usually the correct recommendation.
- Does this include exam fees, books and travel?
- No. It prices the study method and nothing else. The largest omission is not any of those — it is the months you spend not studying, which lengthen the calendar without changing the hours and are the dominant cost in most real budgets. Treat the output as the floor of what a completed project costs.
- The price shown does not match what I see on their site.
- Then theirs is right and ours is stale. Every merchant record carries a `fetchedAt` date and anything over ninety days old is flagged; prices in this category change constantly and promotional pricing is common. The date exists so you can distrust the figure once it ages, which is a more useful design than a number that pretends to be current.
Sources
Everything this tool rests on. The current NFATC programme baseline is printed or transparently derived from the same page; the factors applied on top are ours and are marked as estimates.
- Foreign Language Training — US Department of State, National Foreign Affairs Training Center
The current NFATC training timelines: a typical week is 23 class hours plus 17 hours of self-study, aimed at an integrated ILR 3 in Speaking and Listening. Category I lists 24–30 weeks; using the page's typical class week, this site derives 552–690 class hours. Categories II–IV print 828, 1,012 and 2,200.
- 3 FAM 3910 — Language Incentive Pay Program — US Department of State, Foreign Affairs Manual
The separate current S-3/R-3 normal-course table: Spanish is 24 weeks, French 30, Category II 36, Category III 44 and Category IV 88. Its endpoint differs from the current NFATC integrated Speaking + Listening score, so the two tables must not be merged.
- Guided learning hours — Cambridge English
The cumulative shape between CEFR levels. Cambridge publishes guided-learning-hour bands for its English qualifications (A2 180–200, B1 350–400, B2 500–600, C1 700–800, C2 1,000–1,200). Our factors are normalised against C1 rather than fitted to every band; for example, 0.27 × the 750-hour C1 midpoint is 202.5, just above the A2 band.
- ILR scale — Wikipedia
That no official ILR-to-CEFR crosswalk exists. Published academic tables place ILR 3/3+ at C1; others put C1 nearer ILR 4. We take the lower reading, which makes our estimates the more conservative of the two.
- Zhongwen Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) — Wikipedia
That Hanban's claimed one-to-one HSK-to-CEFR equivalence was rejected by CEFR bodies and is disputed by the German and French associations of Chinese-language teachers, who place old HSK 6 nearer B2–C1 than C2.
- The effect of previously acquired languages on third language acquisition — Heliyon 10(4), original research (2024)
Empirical evidence that previously acquired languages can influence third-language processing, and that structural similarity mattered more than broad typological proximity in the tested tasks. It does not publish an hours-saved coefficient for any pair, so it supports the existence and complexity of transfer but not this site's 30% estimate.
This tool is free and carries no ads or affiliate links. It is funded by commission on some course links elsewhere on the site — which pages, and how that is kept out of the recommendations.
If you got something out of this and are not going to buy a course, you can buy me a coffee instead. Entirely optional, and it changes nothing about what the calculator tells you.