What a coding bootcamp costs

A coding bootcamp costs between nothing and $22,500, and the range is that wide because the schools are not selling the same thing and several of them will not tell you the price at all. Below is every figure we could read on 24 September 2026, with the page it came off.

What the schools that publish a price actually print

Four schools put a number on their own website where a prospective student can find it without talking to anyone. Here they are, in the words each page used.

Two things fall out of that table immediately. The same school charges the same tuition whether you take a programme full-time or part-time — Codesmith's $22,500 and Flatiron's $14,900 do not move with the schedule — so part-time does not save money, it spends time instead. And the same school charges the same for software engineering, data science and cybersecurity, which tells you tuition here is priced per seat and per week, not per subject.

The Springboard arithmetic, which is unusually honest

Springboard is the only school in this set that publishes all three ways of paying side by side, and the gap between them is the clearest illustration on this page of what financing costs. Paid upfront, the programme is $9,900. Paid month to month at $1,540, its own page gives an estimated total of $13,860 over nine months — $3,960 more for the privilege of paying later. Financed through its lender, the page quotes a total tuition amount of $13,860 plus interest, a deposit of $500 to $700 at enrolment, $20 to $476 a month while you study and $379 to $767 a month for thirty to thirty-three months afterwards.

Read that last figure slowly. The bottom of the post-course range, $379 a month for thirty months, is more than eleven thousand dollars of payments after the course has finished, on top of everything paid during it. None of that is hidden — it is all on the school's own page — but it is the number the headline tuition does not contain.

The schools that print nothing

General Assembly runs a page titled Tuition & Financing. On the day we read it, that page described instalment plans of two, three or four payments with no interest, employer reimbursement, government grants, interest-free private loans and interest-bearing private loans, and offered separate financing handbooks for the United States and Canada. It contained no tuition figure. Neither did the Software Engineering Bootcamp course page it links to, which describes what tuition covers without saying what tuition is.

Le Wagon's web development course page behaves the same way: prominent links to see tuition and financing, an offer to help arrange up to 100% of tuition through public funding, and no number. In both cases the price exists; it is simply released through a person.

Nucamp, and the monthly-price trick

Nucamp advertises tuition as $39 a month on most of its bootcamps and $99 a month on one, and its own page title promises part-time bootcamps under $3,000. A monthly figure without a stated number of months is not a price. The page also says tuition can be priced as low as $0 a month with financing, which is a description of a payment plan rather than of a cost.

This is not deception — the programmes genuinely are at the cheap end — but it does mean the arithmetic is left to you, and a reader comparing $39 a month against Codesmith's $22,500 is comparing two things that are not the same kind of number.

What the same money buys elsewhere

For scale, and read on the same day: a year of Treehouse Courses is $250, a year of Zero To Mastery is $299, and Zero To Mastery's one-off lifetime price is $1,299. Treehouse's Techdegree — which Treehouse itself calls a self-paced online bootcamp with a certificate — is $199 a month with no annual option, so six months of it costs less than a tenth of the most expensive tuition above.

None of those buy a cohort, a deadline or a careers team, and the trade is set out properly on the cheaper routes page. But if the question is purely what does it cost, the answer is that a year of subscription against a whole bootcamp programme runs from about thirty times at the cheap end to about ninety times at the expensive one, depending which pair you compare.

The routes where tuition is zero

Two organisations in this space describe their programmes as costing the student nothing, in their own words on their own pages. Ada Developers Academy calls itself a tuition-free, cohort-based coding school. Per Scholas says its training is offered at no cost to learners. Both are selective and neither is available everywhere, so they are not an alternative everyone can choose — but if you are eligible, the most structured option available to you is also the cheapest one on this page.

Flatiron School publishes a third variant worth understanding, because the arithmetic is unusual. Its work-integrated programmes carry tuition of $29,900 against a scholarship of $10,400, leaving a tuition commitment of $19,500, which its own table shows being covered by roughly $19,500 of apprenticeship earnings during the programme. On the accelerated version the figures are $14,900, $3,000 and $11,900 against approximately $26,000 of earnings. Those are the school's own published figures, and what they describe is a job with training attached rather than a course with a discount attached. What free actually means in this market is unpicked in what a free coding bootcamp is.

Why there is no average on this page

Every other page on this subject offers an average bootcamp cost, and we are not going to. An average calculated from the schools that publish a price is an average of the transparent schools only, and the most expensive and least transparent are exactly the ones missing from it. A number like that reads as a fact about the market when it is a fact about our sample.

What to do with these numbers

Write down the total you would actually pay, including financing, for each school you are considering, and put beside it the number of weeks you would be unable to work. That second column is usually larger than the first, and it never appears in anyone's marketing. Then read whether a coding bootcamp is worth it at all with those two figures in front of you.