Indian preschool market 2026: cities, brands and fees

Tuition depends first on the city and then on the tier of school. Mumbai, Gurugram and Bengaluru sit at the top; Indore, Jaipur, Kochi and Lucknow have the lowest budget fees. Within a city, the premium localities run well above the outer ones, so use the band as a starting point and ask each centre for its all-inclusive annual figure in writing.

Direct answers for the cities parents search most, from the same benchmarks as Table 1.

Most Indian preschools take children into playgroup at 2 years, nursery at 3, LKG at 4 and UKG at 5, counted as completed years on the school's cut-off date, which is commonly 31 March. Class 1 then starts at 6, in line with the National Education Policy 2020. Check your child's class with the admission age calculator.

Most Indian preschools run an April-to-March school year, so the main admission season is the months before April. In Chennai and Kochi the year starts in June instead. Nursery classes attached to Delhi's K-12 schools follow the Directorate of Education's admission schedule. Standalone preschools usually admit children through the year when a seat is free, so a mid-year move is rarely a dead end.

Bengaluru has the most listed preschool centres of any Indian city in our directory, followed by Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Delhi. The top of the list is metros and large tier-2 cities. Suburbs such as Gurugram, Noida and Navi Mumbai are ranked as cities in their own right, not folded into Delhi or Mumbai.

Karnataka leads, followed by Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. The states near the top are the ones with the largest city preschool markets, so a state's rank largely follows its biggest cities in Table 3.

Kidzee is the largest preschool franchise network in our directory by listed centres, followed by EuroKids, Bachpan Play School, Little Millennium and Hello Kids. Most franchise centres are run by local owners, so a brand's size tells you about its reach, not about the centre down your road. Compare all 118 brands on the franchise brands page.

Every city we cover has both. A franchise centre follows its brand's curriculum, kit and teacher training, and is easier to research because the brand publishes its centres. An independent preschool sets its own programme and fees and is often run by its founder on site. Neither is safer by default: judge the centre in front of you on ratios, hygiene, the classroom and the all-inclusive fee.

Because chains publish centre locators and independents mostly do not, any directory, ours included, sees franchise centres more easily than a street survey would. That is why this guide ranks cities and brands but does not estimate the franchised share of the market.

Fees come from the Preschools Club fee benchmarks: annual tuition bands for 15 cities in three tiers. They are indicative ranges estimated by the Preschools Club team from published fee information, first published in July 2026 and last reviewed 1 September 2026. They are not a survey of parents and not any school’s actual fee: no count of schools sits behind each band, and they are not drawn from individual listings. They exclude admission, kit, uniform and transport charges unless stated. Fees vary from centre to centre, so confirm the current fee with the school in writing.

Rankings come from the Preschools Club listings database on 25 September 2026, written to a file by a script that queries it, so the tables and the database cannot drift apart. Listings come from franchise brands’ own centre locators, school-owner submissions and our own research, and are de-duplicated and moderated before they go live. It is a directory, not a census: it covers the organised market, and home-run playgroups that do not advertise are under-represented. The directory spans 2,705 cities and towns in 36 states and union territories, 638 of them with their own city page. Cities follow municipal names, so Gurugram, Noida, Ghaziabad, Navi Mumbai and Thane are ranked apart from Delhi and Mumbai.

Entry ages follow the NEP 2020-aligned rule used by our admission age calculator. This page was last updated on 25 September 2026.