The City School vs LGS: Fees, O Levels, Campus Network and Parent Fit

Put The City School and Lahore Grammar School side by side and the first difference is not fees or exam results but who you are actually dealing with. The City School describes itself as one organisation. Its About page names a group chairperson, a head-office team and assistant regional directors, and its campus directory files every branch under a Northern, Central or Southern Region. Its admissions page says it wants to give students across Pakistan the same set of values whether they study in Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or Kashmir. LGS is organised differently, and that shapes almost every practical question a parent will ask.

According to VIS Credit Rating Company's November 2023 report, Lahore Grammar School (Private) Limited is owned in equal 12.5% stakes by eight people, five of whom are executive directors. The report says the school is split into five clusters, each run by a working director, with 'greater autonomy and independence' in terms of cash flows and capex plans. The largest cluster, led by Mrs Nighat Ali, had over 34,000 students, 5,053 employees and 55 campuses at the time. The same report mentions a separate network of ILM Schools for low-income families. These figures are almost three years old, but no later public breakdown turned up in our searches.

Online, LGS has no single front door: we read at least six LGS websites, and the VIS report does not say which cluster runs which of them. lahoregrammar.school, whose campus page credits Mrs Nighat Ali as director, sorts its branches into three tabs: Main Stream, Landmark and Outstation. The Landmark Project, it says, began in April 1997 for middle-income families. Its contact section also lists an 'LGS Franchise Office' in Gulberg III, separate from the corporate office; the site does not say which branches, if any, are franchised, so ask the branch you are considering who runs it. A different site, lgsdefence.edu.pk, takes online applications for 2026-27 not only for LGS Defence Phase 1 and Phase 5 in Lahore but also for LGS Islamabad, Quetta, Gujrat, Peshawar and Rawalpindi. The Johar Town site for senior boys lists eight campuses, divided by stage and in places by sex, plus a Sargodha campus running from playgroup to A Level. An LGS Gulberg Network site describes four campuses of its own in Gulberg, and those addresses also appear in lahoregrammar.school's Main Stream list.

These websites overlap in ways that can confuse a parent. lahoregrammar.school has a page titled LGS PWD Islamabad, yet the address on it is Plot 86, Faiz Ahmad Faiz Road, H-8/1, and the contact email ends in lgsdefence.edu.pk; the welcome message on the same page talks about the Landmark Cantt branch, so parts of it appear to come from another branch's page. In Karachi, lahoregrammar.school and lgskhi.edu.pk both describe a co-educational DHA Phase VIII branch, and lgskhi.edu.pk names Nighat Ali and Samina Rahman as its directors, while lgsdefence.edu.pk links to its own 'LGS Karachi Campus' page, which still advertises admissions for 2023-24. From the websites alone we could not tell whether that is one campus or two. The lgs.edu.pk site would not load when we tried it on 12 October 2026. The practical lesson: before you rely on any LGS policy, fee or date, confirm that it was published by the office that runs your branch.

The City School is easier to count. Filtering its directory city by city, and reading every page of results, gave 88 campuses across SchoolNama's 15 launch cities: 31 in Karachi, 10 in Lahore, 8 each in Islamabad and Hyderabad, 6 in Rawalpindi and between 1 and 5 in each of the others. We then sorted each entry by the class range it shows. In 45 of the 88, the range ends before Class 9, so a child starting there will have to move campus later. Sixteen end at O Level, IGCSE or Matric, nine go on to HSSC, Intermediate or FSc without A Level, and 18 include A Level. Only 13 entries cover the whole run from playgroup to A Level or HSSC at one listing. A Level shows up in 13 of the 15 cities, not in Abbottabad or Sukkur. The directory is the school's own and may lag behind openings and closures, so treat these numbers as a picture of how the network is laid out, not an exact census.

No equivalent count is possible for LGS, because no single list covers every LGS website. The table below records, for each launch city, which LGS website names a branch there. Lahore branches appear on the lahoregrammar.school, Defence, Johar Town and Gulberg Network sites. Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Quetta have application links on the Defence site's admissions page; Karachi, Sialkot and Multan appear on lahoregrammar.school; Sargodha appears on the Johar Town site; and Faisalabad has its own site, lgsfsd.edu.pk, whose page description says the Faisalabad school first 'opened its doors to a handful of students'. Gujranwala is named in lahoregrammar.school's general list of cities, but we found no branch page or admissions link for it. None of the sites we read names a branch in Hyderabad, Bahawalpur, Abbottabad or Sukkur.

For the O Level years, both offer a Cambridge route and Matric, but the mix is set campus by campus. According to its About page, The City School teaches a curriculum 'derived from the UK national curriculum' that carries pupils through to Cambridge exams at IGCSE, O and A Level. Its admissions age table puts O Level students in Class 9, 10 or 11 and Matric students in 9M or 10M. In its directory, 31 of the 88 entries mention Matric. On the LGS side, the Defence site's admissions page shows how much the offer varies under one website: in Lahore it lists an all-boys and an all-girls O Level programme at Phase 5, an all-girls O and A Level programme at Phase 1, and co-educational A Level at Phase 5; LGS Islamabad has co-educational O and A Level; Quetta has application links for preschool to A Levels and for Grade VIII to Matric and FSc; Peshawar and Rawalpindi have links for preschool to O Level and for Matric. The Johar Town site lists IGCSE for Classes 9 to 11 at JT International Senior. LGS Sialkot says its A Level programme began in 2020. If single-sex classes matter to you, note that The City School's Karachi directory also lists separate Girls and Boys campuses from Class 6 upwards, in North Nazimabad and in Gulshan. For subject-level detail at two Lahore LGS campuses, see /news/beaconhouse-vs-lgs-o-levels.

Neither organisation publishes a national fee list. The City School's admissions page says the fee structure slip is given after the family completes the admission form and pays the registration fee. The only official place we found where both names file fees in the same format is Islamabad, where the regulator ICT-PEIRA publishes what each registered school declares. The register lists seven Islamabad entries under The City School's name, and only two had filed 2026-27 fees. For 2026-27, the City School branch in E-11/3 declared Rs 33,463 at Grade I, Rs 39,381 on a line marked O Level and Rs 86,629 at A Level, plus Rs 30,600 on admission. Its DHA campus on GT Road filed Rs 28,428 for Grade I and a Rs 26,000 admission fee. LGS's H-8/1 entry declared Rs 40,477 at Grade I, Rs 42,268 for each of Grades IX, X and XI, and Rs 56,748 at A Level, plus Rs 50,000 on admission. So among these 2026-27 filings, LGS's Grade I fee is higher than at either City School campus, but The City School's E-11 A Level figure is well above LGS's. The register does not label its figures as monthly, termly or yearly. PEIRA's own disclaimer says each school is responsible for any discrepancy in the data it files. Two other LGS entries show how wide the spread is under one name: the IB campus at the same H-8/1 address filed Rs 57,422 for Grades I to V, while an entry registered as Lahore Grammar School in the Police Foundation area, O-9, last filed for 2025-26, at Rs 15,720 for Grade I.

The size of the yearly increase deserves a question at both schools. Compared with 2025-26, the E-11 campus's Grade I, Grade IX and A Level figures each rose by 10.0%, as did the DHA campus's Grade I and Grade IX. The exceptions: the DHA campus's O Level row rose 6.67%, from Rs 30,888 to Rs 32,948, and its admission fee went from Rs 23,000 to Rs 26,000, while the admission fees at E-11/3 and LGS H-8/1 did not change. LGS H-8/1's Grade I, Grades IX to XI and A Level rows rose by the same 10.0%. PEIRA's fee determination policy says a yearly increase of one to five percent must be made under intimation to PEIRA and that an 'extra-ordinary annual increase' needs PEIRA's prior permission. A separate PEIRA scoring sheet for increases beyond five percent sets qualifying scores for rises of up to six, seven and eight percent. The register does not show whether permission was sought or given for any of these filings, so ask the campus to show you PEIRA's approval and its fee schedule for this session. The policy also says fees may not be raised during an ongoing session.

Outside Islamabad, we found no official, current fee figures for either school in SchoolNama's launch cities, so we have not quoted any. Ask for the written schedule, including admission, security, registration, annual and exam charges, before paying anything. Also ask about books and uniforms. Both names were on the list of 17 school systems that the Competition Commission of Pakistan accused, in show-cause notices reported by Dawn on 21 November 2025, of tying parents to approved sellers for branded notebooks, workbooks and uniforms. Profit reported in December 2025 that the commission had extended the deadline for written replies to 30 December 2025. These are allegations, and we found no published final decision. Ask each campus for the full supplies list with prices and whether you may buy elsewhere.

On SchoolNama itself, the two names are recorded unevenly. Only 12 of our listings, every one in Islamabad or Rawalpindi, are attached to The City School's network record so far. Another 54 start with 'The City School', 'City School' or the typo 'Thr City School' but are still unattached, and one of those is a regional office rather than a school. There is no LGS network record. We hold 19 listings whose names include 'LGS' or 'Lahore Grammar School' (Lahore 9, Islamabad 4, Karachi 2, Faisalabad 2, Multan 1, Gujranwala 1), and a few of them duplicate one another. Those counts reflect our records, not the size of either school. Profiles such as /schools/the-city-school-e-11-campus-islamabad and /schools/lahore-grammar-school-islamabad are a starting point, and the city pages /islamabad, /karachi and /lahore list other schools nearby.

So how should a family decide? If you expect to move between cities, The City School's presence in every launch city is a real advantage, though we found no published rule on moving a child from one of its campuses to another, so ask. If your child is starting at a junior City School campus, find out now which senior campus they would move to and whether a seat is assured. If LGS appeals, first find out which LGS office runs the branch near you, because that decides the admissions portal, the fee schedule and the house rules. In both cases, compare your two finalists on /compare, price the daily journey on /pick-and-drop, and keep /tutors in mind if a change of campus or board leaves gaps. Each school is also set against Beaconhouse in separate guides: /news/beaconhouse-vs-city-school and /news/lgs-vs-beaconhouse.