Girls' Boarding Schools in Australia: The Full List, State by State

Australia has 46 all-girls boarding schools, according to the Australian Boarding Schools Association's own member directory (read 28 September 2026). Seventeen are in New South Wales, nine in Queensland, eight in Victoria, seven in Western Australia, three in South Australia, and one each in Tasmania and the ACT. The Northern Territory has none. We've cross-checked every school on that list against our own school directory — 44 of the 46 already have a live AroundSchools profile — and linked straight through so you can see each school's location and details without hunting across 46 different websites.

Key takeaways

• 46 all-girls boarding schools nationally, per the Australian Boarding Schools Association, read 28 September 2026.
• NSW has more than a third of them (17 of 46) — the largest concentration by far.
• About 8 in 10 are in a capital city (or Gold Coast), not the bush — boarding brings rural, interstate and international families into the city more often than it sends city families out to a regional campus.
• Boarding can roughly 2–2.5× the cost of tuition alone — one verified example below shows exactly how much a boarding levy adds on top of day fees.
• No independent academic ranking exists — Australia doesn't publish a boarding-school league table of any kind (see the note below), so this is a complete, sourced list rather than a ranked one.

A quick note on rankings

If your search brought you here looking for a ranking, it's worth knowing upfront: no government body publishes an academic ranking of Australian schools, and AroundSchools doesn't either — our own school records show the fields for that (ICSEA, median ATAR, NAPLAN by grade) are almost entirely unpopulated across the sector, government and independent alike. Anything calling itself a top-10 ranking online is working from reputation, age, or fees, not measured outcomes. For a fit-based decision instead of a ranking, the Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) My School website is the official source for the data that does exist, school by school.

What we can give you here is something no ranking can: the complete, current list, linked to real data — location, sector, and (where a school publishes one) a current fee.

The full list, state by state

Sector is shown as published by the Australian Boarding Schools Association or the school itself. A handful of schools listed as girls' schools enrol boys in the very early years before becoming girls-only from around Year 3 or Year 7 — check each school's own enrolment page for its exact policy.

New South Wales (17)

Sydney families browsing schools generally can also see the full metro fee picture in our Sydney private school fees comparison.

Queensland (9)

For fee context in the wider region, see our Sunshine Coast schools guide.

Victoria (8)

Western Australia (7)

Perth has the most boarding-heavy metro market outside Sydney — see our Perth private school fees comparison for the wider picture.

South Australia (3)

See our Adelaide private school fees comparison for the metro-wide fee picture.

Tasmania (1)

Australian Capital Territory (1)

See our Canberra private school fees comparison for the wider ACT picture.

Northern Territory (0)

The Association's list has no all-girls boarding school within the Northern Territory. Of the schools above, the two Queensland regional options (Rockhampton, Yeppoon) sit geographically closest, though many NT boarding families also look to the larger NSW and Victorian schools.

Most are in the city, not the bush

That split matters for how you think about the decision. Boarding at one of these 44 schools usually doesn't mean sending your daughter to an isolated rural campus — it more often means moving her into the same Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide or Brisbane suburb as any other private day school, with boarders drawn from country NSW, WA's wheatbelt, Pacific and Asian family postings, or simply families who live too far to commute daily. The genuinely regional campuses — Tamworth, Mittagong, Armidale (x2), Toowoomba, Yeppoon and Rockhampton — tend to serve their own surrounding region first.

What boarding actually costs

Boarding fees are the hardest number to get straight in this whole search. Almost every school we checked keeps its current fee schedule locked inside a PDF rather than on a readable web page, which is why you'll rarely find a clean side-by-side comparison online. Rather than guess, we verified one school's current, published figures directly at the source:

At PLC Armidale, a Year 7 boarder's total annual cost is 2.4 times tuition alone once the boarding levy is added — and that pattern (boarding roughly doubling to tripling the headline tuition figure) is broadly consistent with what boarding schools in this sector publish. Rockhampton Girls Grammar School, for comparison, quotes 2026 Year 7–9 tuition of $12,220 (all levies included) with boarding offered on a flexible basis — but, like most schools on this list, doesn't publish an exact boarding figure on its public website.

What this means for you: ask every school on your shortlist for its current, combined tuition-plus-boarding total for the specific year level your daughter will enter — not the headline tuition figure alone, and not last year's number. Fees are set annually and almost always rise, so a number you find today should be reconfirmed directly with the school before you budget against it. For the wider picture of what Australian families pay for schooling generally, see our comparison of how families pay for private school fees and our single-sex vs co-ed fee comparison.

Boarding scholarships and timing

Many of the independent schools on this list run their own boarding-specific scholarships and bursaries, separate from their general academic scholarship rounds — check each school's own scholarships page directly, since eligibility and value vary school to school and we haven't verified boarding-specific terms for every school here.

If scholarships are part of your plan, timing matters: rounds for 2028 entry are opening from November 2026 at many independent schools. Our ACER vs Edutest vs AAS comparison covers how the main testing providers work, our guide to when to start preparing covers the lead time most families need, and our Sydney scholarships guide walks through one city's rounds in full as a worked example.

How we checked this

The 46-school list is the Australian Boarding Schools Association's own published member directory (boarding.org.au/find-a-school), read 28 September 2026 — the peak body for the sector, so we've used its classification rather than compiling our own. We then matched each school by name and state against AroundSchools' own school directory; 44 of the 46 already had a live profile, which we individually confirmed loads correctly before linking. Two schools — Cape York Girls Academy and Worawa Aboriginal College, both specialist boarding programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students — aren't yet in our directory, so we've linked the Association's own listing for those instead of guessing at details we don't hold.

The two dollar figures quoted (PLC Armidale, Rockhampton Girls Grammar) were read directly from each school's own website on 28 September 2026 — not pulled from our internal records, because when we checked our own stored figures for these same two schools against their current published fees, both had drifted by more than 10%. That's why the state-by-state table above lists schools by name and location only, not by fee: we'd rather show you exactly two verified numbers than 44 we can't stand behind.

Frequently asked questions

How many all-girls boarding schools are there in Australia? 46, according to the Australian Boarding Schools Association's member directory, read 28 September 2026. NSW has the most with 17, followed by Queensland (9) and Victoria (8).

Is there an official ranking of girls' boarding schools in Australia? There's no official ranking. Australia doesn't publish an academic league table of schools, so any best-of or top-10 list you find online is working from reputation or fees rather than measured results. Use the state-by-state list above to compare location and sector, and visit shortlisted schools directly.

Are there girls' boarding schools outside the capital cities? Yes, but they're the minority — about 1 in 5 of the 44 schools we could locate precisely sit in a genuinely regional area, including Tamworth, Mittagong and Armidale (NSW), and Toowoomba, Yeppoon and Rockhampton (QLD).

How much more does boarding cost than day tuition? It varies by school, but our one fully-verified example (PLC Armidale) shows boarding taking the total annual cost to roughly 2.4 times tuition alone. Always ask the school directly for its current combined figure for the specific year your daughter will start.

Do any of these schools offer scholarships for boarders? Many do, separately from their general academic scholarship programs — check each school's own scholarships page. Rounds for 2028 entry begin opening from November 2026 at several independent schools.

Is there an all-girls boarding school in the Northern Territory? Not on the Association's list as at September 2026. NT families considering boarding most often look to Queensland, NSW or Victoria.