McGill & Concordia Tuition for Out-of-Province Students: What It Actually Costs
Roughly $12,000/year minimum since fall 2024, up from about $9,000 — unless you're at Bishop's, which got a specific exemption, or in a French-language program.
What changed, and when
Starting with the 2024-2025 academic year, Quebec set a new minimum tuition floor for Canadian students from outside Quebec attending the province's anglophone universities — McGill, Concordia, and (originally) Bishop's — of roughly $12,000 per year, up from about $9,000 previously. The stated goal was to reduce the financial incentive that draws large numbers of out-of-province and international students specifically to anglophone institutions, as part of a broader push to protect French in Quebec's university network.
Why Bishop's is different
Bishop's, in Lennoxville (Sherbrooke), successfully argued that Estrie's demographic and linguistic situation differs from greater Montreal's, and that the hike threatened the institution's viability — roughly a third of its student body is out-of-province Canadian. Quebec's minister of higher education granted Bishop's a fixed exemption: 825 tuition exclusions, letting it keep admitting out-of-province Canadian students at the pre-2024 rate. If Bishop's specifically is on your list, don't assume the McGill/Concordia number applies to you.
The French-language exception
The tuition floor targets anglophone institutions specifically — if you enroll in a French-language program in an eligible field at an institution outside the Montreal metropolitan area, exemptions from the additional out-of-province fees have existed for certain cohorts and program-region combinations, aimed at getting the same government-priority fields (often health, education, and other labour-shortage sectors) taught in French outside Montreal. These exemptions are narrower and more conditional than Bishop's blanket exclusion — check current eligibility directly with the institution and program before assuming it applies to you, since the list of eligible fields and regions is reviewed periodically.
Who's grandfathered
Students already enrolled before the change generally kept the old, lower rate for the remainder of their program. This doesn't help anyone starting now, but it explains why you might hear wildly different numbers from students at the same school depending on when they started.
What isn't affected
Graduate research programs (master's and doctoral, research stream) were excluded from this specific tuition floor. If you're considering research-stream graduate study, the calculus is different from undergraduate — confirm directly with the program.
For the full comparison across all of Quebec's universities
Our French-language tuition comparison guide covers Quebec-resident rates (the lowest in Canada) and international rates in more depth, and our guide to studying in Quebec as a foreign national covers the France/Belgium exemptions, which work on a different basis than the out-of-province Canadian rules described here.