Independent rankings of Pre-K schools in NYC, built from director interviews and verified data — never from school payments.
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Get your top 5 matches — ranked by grades, budget, location, and your child's strengths.
Looking for the best pre-k schools in NYC? We track 21 K-12 options that serve pre-k grades. Annual tuition ranges from $6.2K/yr to $18.4K/yr, with a median of $7.3K/yr across schools that publish a number. Staten Island has the highest concentration with 8 schools, followed by Bronx (5).
Admissions processes vary by school. AdmitCompass surfaces the deadlines, test requirements, and tuition for each campus on its detail page, so families can build a balanced reach / target / safety list. Every school is re-verified through direct outreach to admissions teams; data is refreshed on a 180-day cadence and timestamped on each profile.
See also: ≈$0 with scholarship, Tuition-Free.
We rank by how well each school fits your family — academics, cost, distance, and values. Never by size, popularity, or payment (schools can’t pay for rank). The coarse admission-likelihood band is always free.
Staten Island·Richmond County·Grades PK-12·~650 students
NCES
Selective private school — we don’t have a verified acceptance rate yet. Similar schools admit a solid share of applicants. A general signal by school type, not a personalized estimate.
Forest Hills·Queens County·Grades PK-8·~412 students
State-licensed
Selective private school — we don’t have a verified acceptance rate yet. Similar schools admit a solid share of applicants. A general signal by school type, not a personalized estimate.
Staten Island·Richmond County·Grades PK-12·~400 students
Selective private school — we don’t have a verified acceptance rate yet. Similar schools admit a solid share of applicants. A general signal by school type, not a personalized estimate.
Staten Island·Richmond County·Grades PK-8·~250 students
State-licensed
Selective private school — we don’t have a verified acceptance rate yet. Similar schools admit a solid share of applicants. A general signal by school type, not a personalized estimate.
Brooklyn·Kings County·Grades N-8·~175 students
State-licensed
Selective private school — we don’t have a verified acceptance rate yet. Similar schools admit a solid share of applicants. A general signal by school type, not a personalized estimate.
Bronx·Bronx County·Grades PK-5·~150 students
Selective private school — we don’t have a verified acceptance rate yet. Similar schools admit a solid share of applicants. A general signal by school type, not a personalized estimate.
Staten Island·Richmond County·Grades PK-8·~500 students
NCES
Selective private school — we don’t have a verified acceptance rate yet. Similar schools admit a solid share of applicants. A general signal by school type, not a personalized estimate.
Staten Island·Richmond County·Grades PK-8·~400 students
NCES
Selective private school — we don’t have a verified acceptance rate yet. Similar schools admit a solid share of applicants. A general signal by school type, not a personalized estimate.
Forest Hills·Queens County·Grades PK-8·~380 students
NCES
Selective private school — we don’t have a verified acceptance rate yet. Similar schools admit a solid share of applicants. A general signal by school type, not a personalized estimate.
Flushing·Queens County·Grades PK-8·~373 students
Selective private school — we don’t have a verified acceptance rate yet. Similar schools admit a solid share of applicants. A general signal by school type, not a personalized estimate.
Built relationships, not scrapers. AdmitCompass ranks schools using a composite score that blends four signals: enrollment size (a proxy for stability and program breadth), tuition reasonableness within the local market, freshness of our most recent verification, and a small bonus for schools with full admissions detail published on their profile.
Public data comes from the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and each school's own admissions pages. The information that actually matters to most families — acceptance rates, deadlines, what a director cares about — comes from direct interviews with school directors and admissions coaches across our active markets.
We do not publish scoring weights or per-axis thresholds. That keeps the moat intact: the rankings reflect actual conversations with people inside schools, not a formula anyone with a crawler could clone. Every profile is re-verified on a 180-day cadence, and the "last updated" date is timestamped on every school page.
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Our 2-minute quiz factors in grades, budget, location, and goals to surface the best-fit schools from this list.