Belgrade Private Kindergartens Earn 17.52 Billion Dinars
Private kindergarten revenue in Serbia jumped to 17.52 billion dinars, up 50.4 percent from 2023. Behind the growth is a Belgrade city subsidy of 33,000 dinars per child.
Private preschool institutions in Serbia posted total revenue of 17.52 billion dinars (about 149.4 million euros) in 2025, according to data from credit rating agency CompanyWall covering 413 registered companies in the preschool education sector. That is 50.4 percent more than in 2023. Over the same period, profit at these institutions grew by almost 64 percent, and staff numbers rose 16.5 percent.
The revenue growth lines up with a change to how the city subsidizes private kindergartens. Until 2023, the maximum subsidy in Belgrade was 22,000 dinars (about 188 euros), and it was reduced for every day a child stayed home. That year the city raised the subsidy to 100 percent of the economic price, first to 28,000 dinars (about 239 euros), then to 33,000 dinars (about 281 euros) per child, with no deduction for absences. The 33,000 dinar amount was carried over into 2025.
Aleksandra Camagic, Belgrade’s city secretary for education and child protection, explains the change this way:
“We subsidize the child, or rather the parent, and our wish was to help every family afford the simplest possible arrangement for their child’s time in kindergarten. The subsidy amount is 33,000 dinars, it’s fixed, it isn’t reduced, so there has been real progress on that front compared to the past few years, when the subsidy amount parents received used to be reduced for days the child didn’t attend. Now parents no longer have to worry about that, children in private and public kindergartens are in the same position. Every child is entitled to 33,000 dinars, which can be used at one of the private institutions.”
The effect on enrollment is measurable. The total number of children in Belgrade’s preschool system rose from around 81,500 in 2022 to around 86,000 today. According to the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia, the Belgrade region enrolled 75,822 children in kindergartens for the 2025/26 school year: 54,294, or 71.6 percent, in public institutions, and 21,528 in private ones. The ratio of institutions runs the other way: of 229 preschool institutions in the Belgrade region, 212 are private and only 17 are public. The private sector thus holds nearly 93 percent of all institutions but less than a third of enrolled children, since public institutions run a much more developed network of facilities.
Chartwell International School tops the 2025 revenue list, with nearly 1.38 billion dinars (about 11.8 million euros). It is an international school registered under the preschool education category, but its offering is far broader than a classic kindergarten, so comparing it directly with the rest is only partly fair. Among institutions that match the classic private kindergarten model, the highest revenue went to the Kung-Fu Panda Preschool Institution, with 439.2 million dinars (about 3.75 million euros). It is followed by Happy Kids with 277.8 million dinars (about 2.37 million euros), Baby Palace Andjela with 261 million dinars (about 2.23 million euros), Mega Kids Belgrade’s Novi Beograd branch with 253.8 million dinars (about 2.16 million euros), Macak Garfild with 223.4 million dinars (about 1.9 million euros), and Tresnjober with 213.6 million dinars (about 1.82 million euros).
The market is not concentrated in a handful of large chains. The top five companies by revenue brought in about 2.61 billion dinars (about 22.25 million euros) combined, or 14.9 percent of the sector’s total revenue. The top ten institutions hold 3.57 billion dinars (about 30.44 million euros), or 20.4 percent of the market. The rest, roughly 80 percent, is still spread across a large number of smaller institutions, which is typical for a sector with a low barrier to entry, where the biggest cost, space and teaching staff, scales with the number of children rather than the number of locations.
Geographically, the market is most concentrated in Belgrade, with Novi Sad and Kragujevac standing out among the other centers. The numbers show where the money that parents and the city put in together is actually going: the subsidy has wiped out most of the cost for parents, demand has grown, and most of that money now flows to dozens of mid-sized and small private institutions rather than to a few dominant chains. What remains an open question is how long the city can keep the subsidy at 100 percent of the economic price while the number of private institutions keeps growing year after year.
