A Level Private Candidate Fees for Summer 2027: What 30 Exam Centres Charge

Three facts about A Level private candidate fees for summer 2027

• £320 to £600: Published centre fee for one A Level, summer 2027 (median £445, 30 sites).
• £109.60 to £167.40: What AQA, Pearson and OCR charge centres for most A Levels, summer 2027.
• £500 to £1,000: Extra charge for the science practical endorsement at centres that offer it.

All prices were read on each centre's or exam board's own page on 30 October 2026. The survey covers 30 exam centre sites run by 12 organisations in 14 towns and cities in England.

What exam centres charge private candidates for one A Level

This is the fee each centre publishes for a typical written A Level, such as Psychology, or its flat fee where it charges the same for every subject. Maths, Further Maths, languages and subjects with coursework often cost more, as the notes show.

Counting every site, the median is £445. Counting each organisation once, it is £390. Two networks pull the per-site figure about: Tutors & Exams publishes one £549 fee for 10 centres and Excel Exam Centres one £320 fee for 6. Location matters too. A-Team Academy charges £400 for the same A Level in Birmingham and £505 in Liverpool.

Disclosure: Tutors & Exams is Lift College's exam centre partner. Its fees are shown exactly as it publishes them.

Board fee vs what you pay the centre

The exam board charges the centre an entry fee. The centre then adds its own costs for invigilation, rooms, administration and certificates. These are the boards' published summer 2027 fees for most A Levels.

So for AQA Psychology, which costs a centre £114.60, the board fee is roughly a fifth to a third of the centre prices in the survey.

Sciences: the practical endorsement can cost more than the exam

A Level Biology, Chemistry and Physics come with a separate practical endorsement. If you need it, you sit the written papers and complete the required practicals at a centre that runs them. Where centres publish a price, it is an extra £500 to £1,000 per science.

Several centres only offer the written science papers. If you are taking a science for the first time, check whether your university or course asks for the endorsement before you book.

Deadlines and late fees for summer 2027

AQA, Pearson and OCR all set an entry deadline of 21 February 2027, with late fees from 22 February 2027. The boards' late fee is about the same again as the entry fee, and a very late entry from around 21 April 2027 costs two and a half to three times the entry fee. Centres set their own deadlines earlier, mostly between 1 and 18 February 2027.

How to budget for an A Level as a private candidate

• Choose your board and specification first. Centres price by board and subject, and not every centre takes every board.
• Book before the centre's deadline, not the board's. Most centres close in early February 2027, weeks before the boards' 21 February date.
• Add the practical endorsement for sciences if you need it, and check the centre offers it.
• Allow for extras such as language speaking tests, coursework marking and access arrangements, which centres charge separately.
• Plan your study. The exam fee covers sitting the exam only. Study the course online with Lift College on our A Level courses, or read our GCSE resit cost survey if you are sitting GCSEs too.

Method and limits

On 30 October 2026 we read the private candidate price lists that exam centres publish online, and the summer 2027 fee lists from AQA, Pearson and OCR. Each centre row links to its source below. Networks that publish one price for several centres are counted at each site.

• Alpha Tutorials and Nottingham College publish a price per paper. We show the total for a three-paper A Level.
• Some centres ask you to enquire for a price, or publish GCSE fees only. They are not in the survey. We found no published A Level prices in Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, Cardiff, Oxford, Cambridge or Brighton.
• We left out an entry agent that books places at other centres, a page still showing summer 2023 prices, a fee list published only as an image, and a centre that prices per unit before tax.
• Prices change. Check the centre's own page before you book.