🔶 “The expensive Mehr” — how much does it cost to go to school in Iran?

🔻Report by Danial Babayani

Elham, who lives in Tehran, a few days before the start of the academic year went to the market to buy stationery for her son. This year he will enter the fourth grade of primary school. She says that from the beginning she had decided to buy only essential items and not go for expensive goods, but the price of a few simple items was beyond what she expected.

In an interview with Deutsche Welle Persian, she says: “I got one pen, one colored pencil, one pencil and an eraser, with two 60-page notebooks. It came to one million tomans. I even bought the lowest-quality items and tried not to buy expensive goods.”

But this is not all the purchases a student needs to make at the start of the school year; the bag and pencil case, colored pencils and other stationery, clothing and shoes, and transportation costs can make the final figure much higher.

Ahead of the new school year, various reports have been published about the increase in the prices of school supplies.

Estimates vary depending on the type and quality of goods, but one field estimate cited by Mohammad Qadsi, an expert at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Vienna, calculates the cost of an average basket of stationery and school necessities at around 13 to 15 million tomans; not including uniforms, shoes, textbooks, school transportation, and other educational expenses.

Qadsi says in an interview with Deutsche Welle Persian that if we use the 13 to 15 million toman figure as a baseline, the cost of preparing only one student for school could consume a large portion of the monthly wages of a minimum-wage laborer.

He says: “Preparing this basket for one student is roughly equivalent to 78 to 90 percent of the base monthly wage.”

According to Qadsi, the base monthly wage for workers in 1405 is about 16 million and 625 thousand tomans, and even when considering wage benefits, the cost of buying school supplies takes up a significant share of the monthly income of a minimum-wage household.

For families with more than one child, the numbers become bigger. If the same average basket is considered for each child, Qadsi calculates that the cost of initial stationery and supplies for two students would be about 26 to 30 million tomans, and for three students about 39 to 45 million tomans.

These figures still do not include clothing, shoes, textbooks, and transportation. But many families are not necessarily able to fully prepare such a basket.

📌 Read the full text of the report on the Deutsche Welle Persian website.