The Australian boarding schools list

This list is a working catalogue of campuses that publicly offer, or have recently offered, boarding in Australia. Cards below are published profiles — suburb, affiliation, gender and a link to the official site when we can verify it. They are not recommendations. A crest on this page does not mean a bed is available for your entry year.

How should a family use a national list? Filter first. Open a state hub if travel is the constraint. Open a gender pathway if the house type is the constraint. Historical ranking URLs such as girls’ boarding in Sydney still exist so old citations resolve; they are filtered lists, not league tables.

What this directory will not do is invent a “top ten”, a live national fee band, or an enrolment guarantee. Tuition and boarding are almost always separate lines. Scholarships may touch one line and leave the other untouched. Overseas families need a CRICOS-registered provider and an approved welfare arrangement if the student is under 18. Those facts live on government registers and on the school’s current documents.

Names repeat across states — PLC, St Catherine’s, St Hilda’s, Scotch, Grammar. They are different legal entities. Open the suburb, not just the crest. Several historic boys’ schools now teach co-educational juniors while keeping a boys’ senior house. Third-party lists lag. The gender chip on a card is our last verified public note, not a promise.

Regional houses in Armidale, Orange, Tamworth, Ballarat, Toowoomba, Charters Towers, Townsville, Bunbury and Esperance sit on the same list as inner-city campuses because families actually compare them. They are not interchangeable. Saturday night, airport transfers and mid-term exeats change the culture even when the chapel architecture looks similar.

After you open three profiles, write to admissions. Ask for the boarding handbook and this year’s tuition-plus-boarding schedule. Ask which nights are included. Ask who is on duty after lights-out. Then decide. We do not enrol students and we do not speak for any campus. Corrections to public facts are welcome via the contact page.