This site does not produce data: it structures it. Everything published comes from an official registry and can be traced back to it. Here is where every figure comes from, what it really measures and the rules we have set ourselves.
The Registro de Universidades, Centros y Títulos is the administrative census of the Spanish university system. It provides the list of universities, their official code, their legal status, their autonomous community and their mode of study. Retrieved 3 August 2026: 99 universities, 50 public and 49 private.
The Sistema Integrado de Información Universitaria publishes the academic performance statistics for undergraduate degrees, broken down by university, field of study and sex. Retrieved 3 August 2026; 89 of the 99 universities have data.
«Qué Estudiar y Dónde en la Universidad» is the official search tool for the university catalogue. It provides each university’s undergraduate degrees, their mode, their places and their cut-off marks. Retrieved 3 August 2026, 2025-2026 academic year. Cut-off marks only exist for public universities: private ones do not use the shared merit-based admission system.
Social Security affiliation of graduates, one and four years after finishing, with contract type and average contribution base. Retrieved 3 August 2026. Much of the fine-grained breakdown is protected by statistical secrecy, so there are gaps.
Bibliometrics (publications, citations, normalised impact and each profile's position) come from the CWTS Leiden Ranking Open Edition: indicators by Leiden University's Centre for Science and Technology Studies, computed on open OpenAlex data and published with a DOI in the public domain (CC0). We compute the position ourselves by ordering the Spanish universities in the file — those above its output threshold — by normalised citation impact, and it is recomputed on every verification. It measures research, not teaching. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
Universities below the Leiden Ranking's output threshold show their research output directly from OpenAlex, the open (CC0) database on which CWTS computes its indicators: articles affiliated to the university in the same year window as Leiden, citations received per publication up to the retrieval date, and the share in open access. These are direct counts, not field-normalised, which is why those universities have no position in the bibliometric rank. Retrieved 22 August 2026.
Price per credit for first enrolment in an undergraduate degree, 2026-2027 academic year: the one each region sets by decree according to the degree’s lab-cost band, compiled in the EPPU yearbook, and each individual degree’s price in QEDU. We do not publish a per-university average: it is not the price of any degree. It covers public universities only. Retrieved 3 August 2026.
The price ranking orders by the cost of the first year: what it costs to enrol in 60 credits. For private universities it orders the median of their fees —what a typical degree costs there— because the cheapest and most expensive degrees in a catalogue are set by a single programme and say little about what studying there costs; both figures appear alongside anyway. For public ones, the price per credit times 60.
Public and private universities sit in separate tables because no university falls between the most expensive public one and the cheapest private one: a single list would order «public or private» and nothing else.
Public universities are compared within each field of study and never by their average. Each region sets the price per credit, so its universities charge almost the same and what would move the average is which degrees each one offers: we would be ordering the catalogue, not the price.
It orders tuition, not the cost of living. City rent appears alongside because it matters for the decision, but it is not something the university decides, so it does not place anyone in a rank.
Living costs are estimated from two sources: the rent declared to the tax agency for the typical flat in each campus municipality (SERPAVI, 2024), split between three people to estimate a room, and the average food spending per person in each region (INE Household Budget Survey, 2023). The academic year counts ten months. Today’s rental listings usually ask for more than contracts already declared.
Grants are the general undergraduate grants of the 2023-2024 academic year (SIIU). The average grant divides the total amount awarded among recipients: it includes the tuition amount and mixes those receiving the residence allowance with those living at home, so the net cost with a grant we publish errs on the low side.
This is the only source on this site that is not official, and it is labelled as such everywhere. There is no ministerial statistic on private university fees, so we take them from each university’s own fees page: 37 of the 49 private universities publish one, 12 do not.
What we publish is the exact wording the university itself writes, copied from its website and checked against the capture we keep: if that sentence does not appear letter for letter in the evidence, the figure never reaches the page. We derive nothing from it —not the cost of the full degree, not a per-credit price out of an annual fee, not averages across universities— because each university publishes in a different unit and unifying them would require assumptions of ours. The wording is quoted in its original Spanish.
Every price carries its source link and its own warning: the published fee is not the final bill. The date of each capture lives in the source inventory on this page, not on the profile. When a university publishes no price, its profile says so.
Since August 2026, when a university publishes no fee but a reference publication reports its per-credit price, we publish that range labelled “estimated price”, with the tuition for a 60-credit year derived from it and a link to the source; that tuition goes into the annual cost and onto every degree page of the university like any other fee. This applies to 1 university (source: Forbes España).
No official register says which language each degree is taught in, so we take it from the degree’s page on its university’s website, under the same contract as prices: the page’s exact wording, checked against the capture we keep — if it does not appear letter for letter, it is not published. When the website does not declare it, the page shows no language: Spanish is never assumed by default. It currently covers 1654 degree offerings from 63 universities.
The full inventory of what feeds the site. Data pages do not repeat it: it lives here and in each profile’s structured data.
| Source | Publisher | Retrieved |
|---|---|---|
| RUCT — Registro de Universidades, Centros y Títulos | Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades | 3 August 2026 |
| SIIU — Estadística de rendimiento académico | Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades | 3 August 2026 |
| SIIU — Estadística de inserción laboral de egresados universitarios | Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades | 3 August 2026 |
| SIIU — Estadística de precios públicos universitarios | Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades | 3 August 2026 |
| QEDU — Qué Estudiar y Dónde en la Universidad | Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades | 3 August 2026 |
| CWTS Leiden Ranking Open Edition 2025 | CWTS (Universidad de Leiden), sobre datos de OpenAlex | 10 August 2026 |
| OpenAlex — producción científica por institución | OurResearch | 22 August 2026 |
| SIIU — Estadística de estudiantes universitarios | Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades | 11 August 2026 |
| SIIU — Estadística de becas y ayudas al estudio | Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades | 9 August 2026 |
| SERPAVI — Sistema Estatal de Referencia del Precio del Alquiler de Vivienda | Ministerio de Vivienda y Agenda Urbana | 9 August 2026 |
| INE — Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares | Instituto Nacional de Estadística | 9 August 2026 |
| Application calendars from 17 regional admission districts | Each autonomous community | 10 August 2026 |
| Fee pages of 37 private universities | The universities themselves | 3 August 2026 – 30 August 2026 |
The Ministry’s statistics are re-usable public-sector information, including for commercial purposes, under Spanish Law 37/2007 and Royal Decree 1495/2011. The conditions are to cite the source, mention the update date, not distort the meaning of the information, and not suggest that the Ministry sponsors or endorses this website — it does not. The attribution the Ministry requires, shown in the footer of every page and in the table above, is: «Elaboración propia con datos extraídos del catálogo de datos del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (ciencia.gob.es)».
The rates have similar names and measure different things. Each one carries its own reference year or cohort, because SIIU does not publish them all at once.
The latest published: that of the last student admitted in the 2025 pre-enrolment, for the 2025-2026 academic year. We name it by the year of the course it gives access to —"2026 cut-off mark"—, which is how people search for it and cite it when preparing the next pre-enrolment; each table says so in its note. When the next summer’s marks are published, we will replace them.
By cut-off mark, highest first, and each row is one degree at one campus: the same degree at two campuses is two rows, because it has two marks. Ties are broken by the degree name, so the order is the same in every publication. Marks from different regions are never averaged: each runs its own admissions round, and an average of those numbers means nothing.
Because demand sets it, not the university: it is where the line fell when the places ran out. It rises with more applicants or fewer places, and falls when the opposite happens. It tells you what you need to get in, not how well the course is taught.
Cut-off marks exist where an admissions district hands out a limited number of places, which is the public university system. Where there is none, there is no figure to publish, and those degrees are not in these rankings.
Because those rates depend above all on the profile of the students each university admits: one that selects through a high cut-off mark starts with students who already had better results, and that shows up in its rates without the teaching having to be any better. Ordering by them would produce a list that looks like a measurement and means nothing. The site's rankings order by what a university can claim credit for —research impact and its graduates' employment and pay—, always with the indicator and denominator alongside.
Yes. The 99 universities in the registry —50 public and 49 private— have the same profile, the same indicators and the same rules. Public or private status is a visible attribute and a filter, never a criterion for inclusion or for ordering. No university pays to be listed.
The percentage of students in a cohort who are no longer enrolled in the degree they started. It includes both those who leave university altogether and those who switch to other studies without leaving the system; that is why we also publish the change-of-studies rate, which isolates that second case. A high dropout rate does not necessarily mean academic failure.
SIIU publishes with a lag of about two years, and each indicator with its own: the pass rates for 2023-2024 were published in October 2025, while dropout rates are calculated by following cohorts over several years and arrive later. It is not a defect we can fix, so every figure carries its reference year written next to it instead of being grouped under a common label that would be false.
10 of the 99 universities in the registry have no outcome data published by SIIU, almost always because they were created very recently or because they teach no undergraduate degrees. They appear in the directory, with that circumstance stated, but they have no page of their own: a profile without data helps nobody.
From their own websites, and only from there. There is no official statistic on private university fees: the Ministry publishes the official per-credit prices set by each autonomous community, and that statistic covers only the 47 public universities. So we go to each private university’s fees page, keep a full capture of it as evidence, and publish the exact wording the university itself writes —«9.900 € por curso», «112 € por crédito», quoted in Spanish— with the link in plain sight and the label «price published by the university». We never convert that wording to another unit or work out what the full degree would cost: it would depend on the duration, on yearly increases and on what each fee includes, and nobody publishes any of that.
Not directly, and that is why we do not do it for you. The public price is a per-credit amount set by regional decree; a private university’s is a commercial fee that each university defines however it wants —per year, per credit, per programme, with «from» in front— and that usually leaves out the seat reservation, registration, insurance and materials. We put the public reference alongside so you can size the figure, but they are different units, and presenting them as one measure would be exactly the kind of appealing, false number this site exists not to publish.
Because they do not publish one. Some hide it behind a lead-capture form —you have to leave your phone number to find out what it costs—, others publish no fee at all, and others have no common undergraduate fee because each degree carries its own. In all three cases the profile says so, because for anyone choosing a university that is information too. And some websites do not allow their fees page to be captured: there the profile simply points to the website.
From RUCT (the official census of universities, centres and degrees), from SIIU (academic performance, labour-market outcomes and official public fees) and from QEDU (degrees, places and cut-off marks), all of the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades. It is re-usable public data, including for commercial purposes, under Spanish Law 37/2007 and Royal Decree 1495/2011, with the obligation to cite the source and not distort its meaning.