How Many Montessori Schools Are There? US and Worldwide Numbers

For private schools, the reference is the federal Private School Universe Survey. Its 2023-24 results, published in May 2026, estimate 2,378 private schools with a Montessori program emphasis, or 7.8% of the 30,553 private schools in the country, enrolling 101,795 students (NCES 2026-015, Table C-1). The survey covers schools that teach at least one grade from kindergarten to 12th, so preschool-only Montessori programs fall outside it. Schools report their own program emphasis. The questionnaire gives no definition of Montessori.

That 2,378 is a weighted estimate. NCES scales up the answers it receives to stand in for the schools that did not reply, and 77% of schools responded in 2023-24 (unweighted). The school-by-school file it releases holds only the schools that completed the survey, as the 2021-22 user's manual spells out. Count the Montessori schools in that file and you get a smaller number. Neither figure is wrong. Our directory matches listings against those school records, which is why the number of our US listings confirmed by NCES also sits below the estimate.

Public schools are counted separately. In June 2026, NCMPS reported 596 public Montessori schools and programs in 43 states and Washington, DC. Of these, 366 are district schools, including 85 magnet programs, and 230 are charter schools, serving just under 200,000 children in all (NCMPS, June 18, 2026).

The public and private figures come from different organizations, in different years, under different definitions. That is why the table shows them on separate rows. There is no total.

The world figure comes from the 2022 Global Montessori Census by Mira Debs, Jaap de Brouwer, Angela K. Murray, Lynne Lawrence, Megan Tyne and Candice von der Wehl, published on December 19, 2022 in the Journal of Montessori Research (Debs et al., 2022, DOI 10.17161/jomr.v8i2.18675). It documents 15,763 Montessori schools in 154 countries, roughly 9% of them government funded.

The authors surveyed national and regional Montessori organizations, then checked the results against other published estimates and direct contacts, country by country. They used the broadest definition of Montessori that each country's organizations apply, and they warn that several countries may be undercounted. The article is published under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which allows us to reproduce its country figures with credit.

The census estimate for the United States covers public and private schools together and dates from 2022, so it won't match either US figure above.

According to the census, the countries with the most Montessori schools are the United States, China, Thailand, Germany, Canada and Tanzania. The ones with the most government-funded Montessori schools are the United States, Thailand, the Netherlands and India.

Some country figures are much firmer than others. For China, the authors chose 1,100 schools from estimates that ranged from 200 to 6,000, and they flagged the number as one to keep watching. Treat small gaps between countries as noise.

Next to each census estimate, the table shows how many schools our directory lists in that country. Our coverage is uneven. It also reaches fewer countries than the census does, and in some places it is far from complete. When our count is lower, we probably haven't found every school there yet, while a higher count can come from nurseries and preschools that a national organization doesn't treat as schools.

Our directory is a separate count, built from listings we checked one by one rather than from a survey. Each listing is a single campus with an address. We match it against sources such as the NCES private school records, the school's own website, its name and its map category.

A listing gets the Verified Montessori badge when an official record, such as the US Department of Education's private school survey, lists the school as Montessori, or when its own website describes it as Montessori and other signals agree, such as its name or web address. Listings with weaker evidence appear without the badge. We include preschool-only programs, public schools and schools outside the US, which no single official source covers.

That makes our numbers useful for finding schools near you and less useful as a national statistic. In the tables, our counts sit next to the official figures for the same place, and we never add the two together. Directory figures are as of November 2026.

If you know of a Montessori school we are missing, or one that has closed, tell us so we can check it.