The Nigerian School Year: What Is Published and What You Must Ask For

If you are moving a family to Nigeria, you want the school year on a calendar before you book anything. This page will not give you term dates, and that is the finding rather than a gap: we could not obtain a published Nigerian school calendar from a source we could verify. What we can settle is the shape of the year, and we can settle it from a school's own fee page.

Why there are no term dates here

An earlier version of this page set out resumption, mid-term break, examination and closure dates across all three terms, and gave a term length in weeks. None of that rested on a published source. It has been removed in full rather than hedged.

This matters more than it looks. Nigerian schools set their own calendars within state guidance, so a single national set of dates would be wrong for most readers even if it existed. The dates that govern your year come from one place: the calendar your child's school publishes for the coming academic year. Ask the admissions office for it in writing, and ask for the examination weeks separately, because they are often issued later than the term dates.

What one school's fee page does settle

There is one structural fact we can source properly. St Saviour's School Ikoyi in Lagos publishes its own fee schedule, and the tuition line reads TERMLY TUITION (3 TERMS PER YEAR). Read on 6 October 2026, for the 2026/2027 academic year.

That sentence is doing real work. The number of terms in a Nigerian school year is not our assumption and not an aggregator's claim — it is on a school's own invoice line: three terms per year. Everything else about the calendar, the dates, the lengths and the breaks, we are leaving to your school.

The money calendar is the same calendar

Because fees are billed by the term, the school calendar and your cash calendar are the same document. From the same published fee schedule:

• NGN 4,076,277 per child per term (about USD 3,030).
• NGN 12,228,831 per child per year (about USD 9,095). That annual figure is the school's own multiplication, not ours — it follows from its three-terms line.

Two warnings on those figures. First, no bill arrives monthly. Our own dataset also holds a monthly version of this number, and we are not printing it here, because dividing a termly invoice by twelve produces a budgeting aid and not a bill. Second, this is a British-curriculum primary school in one of the most expensive districts of Lagos. It answers the top of the market and says nothing about the average; public education costs a fraction of this.

Why so little of this is published at all

When we went looking for Nigerian school fees, three of the four Lagos international schools we checked published no fee schedule at all, and the fourth published only an application fee. That is why a single school's page is carrying the structural fact in this article. Nearly every fee figure circulating for Nigerian schools comes from aggregators that cannot show their working, and we did not use any of them.

The practical lesson for a calendar question is the same: if the fees are not published, the term dates very likely are not either. Plan on having to ask.

The examination that decides university entry

For a child finishing senior secondary school, the external examination that matters for university admission is the West African Senior School Certificate Examination, administered by the West African Examinations Council. We are naming the examination and the body, and deliberately not printing a timetable, a registration deadline or a fee: none of those is in our verified sources, and a missed registration window is exactly the kind of damage a guessed date does.

Get the current timetable from the Council and from your child's school, and get them both, because a school's internal examination weeks and the external examination weeks are different things on the same calendar.

The figures we were offered and did not use

Our pipeline attached ten measured education amounts to this page. Seven of them are annual tuition per grade level at the American international schools in Lagos and Abuja, from United States Department of State fact sheets with a reference date of 1 April 2026. They are sound figures and they are in the wrong article: a tuition table per grade says nothing about when a term starts or when examinations fall.

So two of the ten are used here, and both only because they carry the three-terms structure with them. The other eight are left where they belong, on the pages about school costs.

What expats should know

• No term dates are published here. Get them from your child's school in writing.
• Three terms per year is sourced, from a school's own fee line, read 6 October 2026.
• Fees are billed per term: NGN 4,076,277 per child per term at that school.
• No bill arrives monthly. Treat any monthly school figure as a budgeting device.
• That school is top of the market. Public education costs a fraction of it.
• Most Nigerian schools publish no fees, so expect to have to ask for dates too.
• Ask separately for examination weeks. They are often issued after the term dates.
• The external examination is the WASSCE, run by the West African Examinations Council. Get the timetable from them, not from us.

Where to check

The three-terms line and the termly and annual tuition are from St Saviour's School Ikoyi's published fee schedule, read 6 October 2026 for the 2026/2027 year. The per-grade tuition figures we declined to use for a calendar question are the United States Department of State Office of Overseas Schools fact sheets for Lagos and Abuja, reference date 1 April 2026. Converted at 1 USD = 1,344.40 NGN. Term dates and examination timetables come from your school and from the examinations council.

AI-Generated Content: This article was created with AI assistance and may contain inaccuracies. Please verify important information with official sources.