Living in Bali with Kids — Schools, Costs, Safety and What We Learned

It was a Tuesday. Not a holiday Tuesday, just a regular one.

Rosalia had cried for four minutes because her uniform shirt felt “scratchy,” which it did not. Risa Mia was running laps around the villa garden in her dinosaur pajamas refusing to put on shoes and the warung lady two doors down was already calling her name through the gate because she brings Risa Mia a rambutan every single morning and knows the schedule better than we do.

Dian was on a call. I was trying to find my keys, which were in the exact spot I always put them, a fact I discovered after checking everywhere else. The pool filter made its 8am noise. A gecko fell off the ceiling onto the kitchen counter and neither of us looked up.

This is what living in Bali with kids actually looks like. Not the pictures. The pictures are real too, those are just the ten minutes between chaos and more chaos. The Tuesday feeling is what I want to write about here, because nobody writes about that. Everyone writes about the holiday version. We are not on holiday.

We live here.

Why We Started Living in Bali with Kids

We didn’t come here the way most families do, chasing a beach holiday or a deal on a villa. We came because Dian is half Indonesian. Her family is from Yogyakarta, on Java. Indonesia is not a destination for us. It’s part of who she is, which means it’s part of who we are, which means it’s part of who our kids are growing up to be.

That matters for how you read everything else in this post. We didn’t arrive as strangers. Dian knows the language, knows the culture, knows how to navigate things that would be completely opaque to someone arriving without that background. If you’re coming fresh with no connection and no Indonesian, some of this will be harder for you than it was for us. I’ll try to say where.

We are not officially relocated. We haven’t emigrated. This is an extended stay, though at this point it functions exactly like living here because it IS living here. Schools, routines, community, costs. The whole shape of a life.

We’re based in Canggu. That context matters for the numbers I give you below.

Schools — the real picture

This is where most families in our position start. You have to sort school before you sort almost anything else, because the school determines the area, and the area determines the villa, and the villa determines your commute, and your commute in Bali traffic is not a variable you want to discover after you’ve signed a lease.

There are three schools that come up again and again in expat conversations here, and I’ll give you an honest read on each.

Canggu Community School (CCS) is the one most families in our area end up at, and there’s a reason for that. It’s international curriculum, run well, and the community around it is genuinely good. Rosalia went here. The thing nobody tells you before you arrive is how much of the actual value comes from the parent community. WhatsApp groups that actually work. People sharing driver contacts, visa agent recommendations, which warung has a reliable wifi connection for working parents waiting between pickup and a meeting. The school itself is solid. The community around it is the part we didn’t expect to care about as much as we do.

Fees at CCS run somewhere in the $500 to $1,200 per month range depending on year group and whether you’re enrolling mid-year. Waiting lists exist for some year levels. Email them before you book flights.

Green School Bali is the one everyone has heard of. It’s near Ubud, it’s genuinely unlike any school you’ve seen, and the philosophy is serious rather than decorative. Bamboo buildings, nature-based curriculum, outdoor everything. 

Green School is expensive, more expensive than CCS in most cases. Think $1,500 to $2,000 per month at the higher year groups. It’s also genuinely rural. If your child thrives in that environment, it can be exceptional. If your child needs structure and consistency above all else, it may not be the right fit. Neither answer is wrong.

Bali Island School is in Sanur, which is further east. It runs an IB curriculum, it’s more traditionally structured, and it tends to attract families who want something closer to the international school experience they’d recognize from home. We haven’t sent a child there so I can’t speak to it from the inside, but the families I know who chose it are happy with it and found the transition to secondary school smoother because of the IB framework.

Sanur as a base is calmer than Canggu. Different pace, different vibe. Worth considering if the Canggu noise doesn’t appeal.

What I’d say across all of them: quality varies. Do not assume that because a school has a good reputation and a professional website that it will suit your child. Visit if you can. Ask about class sizes. Ask about teacher turnover, because that’s the number that tells you more than anything else about whether a school is run well. Some schools here churn through foreign teachers every six months. That’s not stability.

Also: no school here is going to be cheap. If you’re looking at Bali as a way to reduce your cost of living and you have school-age children, you need to factor this in carefully. Two kids in decent international schools easily costs $2,000 to $3,500 per month before you’ve bought a single satay.

→ Full guide: [Schooling in Bali — What Expat Families Actually Need to Know]

What it costs to actually live here

I am going to give you real numbers. Approximate, because costs shift and every family is different, but specific enough to be useful.

These are based on our life in Canggu as a family of five, covering 2024 and into 2025.

Villa: A three-bedroom villa with a pool in Canggu runs $2,000 to $4,000 per month. The range is real and it depends on the area within Canggu (Berawa and Batu Bolong are more expensive than further inland), whether you’re renting high season or low season, and whether you’re taking a yearly contract or month to month. Year contracts are significantly cheaper. We pay toward the lower end of that range on a yearly contract. If you arrive expecting to find something good for $1,200, you will be disappointed, or you will be very far from where you want to be.

School fees: As above. Budget $500 to $2,000 per child per month depending on school and year group. We have three children in two schools. I’ll let you do the math.

Groceries: We shop at a mix of local markets and western supermarkets. Seminyak has good western options. Pepito and Bintang are the main ones people use. Canggu has enough for day to day. Total grocery spend for five people is $400 to $700 per month. The gap between those numbers is about how much you’re buying imported western products versus local ones. Local produce is cheap. A block of Dutch cheese costs what a Dutch cheese costs.

Eating out: This is where Bali is genuinely different. You can eat very well here at every price level. A warungs meal for the family, the kind Risa Mia tips onto herself with enthusiasm, costs maybe $8 total. A proper restaurant meal with drinks in Canggu costs what a European meal costs. We probably spend $800 to $1,500 per month eating out, and we eat out a lot, because the food is good and because cooking for five every night in the Bali heat is a choice I respect but do not always make.

Transport: We don’t own a car. We have a private driver arrangement that costs $400 to $700 per month. This covers school runs, errands, longer trips. Gojek and Grab handle the shorter things. If you’re coming with young kids and you’re thinking about trying to do everything on a scooter, I would encourage you to think carefully. Traffic in Bali is real. We’ll come back to that.

Domestic help: We have a helper who comes daily. $200 to $400 per month is typical. This is normal here at this level of life. The arrangement is professional, it’s common, and it means we function. If this makes you uncomfortable as a concept, that’s worth sitting with before you come, because it will come up.

Utilities: Electricity is the surprise. Air conditioning in a Bali climate costs money, and if you have a villa with AC in multiple rooms and you use it, your electricity bill will be higher than you expected. $100 to $300 per month is the realistic range. You can reduce it by using fans where possible and accepting that some rooms will be warm. In a pool villa there’s also water and pool maintenance to factor in.

Total realistic monthly budget for a family of five living well in Canggu:

$5,000 to $9,000 per month.

That number surprises people. Bali has a reputation for being cheap, and it is cheap in ways that matter, but a family of five with children in international schools is not living a backpacker existence. You will spend money. The question is whether you’re spending it on things that feel worth it, and for us, the answer has mostly been yes.

If you’re coming with a budget of $3,000 a month and two kids, this life is not going to work the way you imagine it.

Visas — the honest version

I’m going to be straightforward here because this is where a lot of families get tripped up or just decide to stay vague about it to avoid thinking about it.

There is no simple, clean, long-term visa for families who want to live in Bali the way we live in Bali.

The tourist or social visit visa gives you 60 days. It can be extended, sometimes to 180 days total. After that you need to leave the country and come back, or you need a different category. A border run to Singapore or Malaysia costs maybe $300 to $500 per person when you factor in flights and a night or two away. Some families do this multiple times a year. It works until it feels like a hassle, and it always eventually feels like a hassle.

The KITAS, which is a limited stay permit, is more stable. It’s available through certain categories: spouse of an Indonesian national is one. A company director or employee of an Indonesian company is another. It requires paperwork, fees, and usually a visa agent who knows what they’re doing. Budget $500 to $1,500 in agent fees depending on complexity. It’s worth it for the stability.

The digital nomad visa, formally called the E33G, was introduced relatively recently. It has specific income requirements (reportedly around $2,000 per month provable), and it allows you to stay for up to five years without working locally. Some families use it. Requirements and processing times shift, so check current conditions with an agent rather than relying on what you read in a Facebook group from 2023.

The reality most families in Canggu operate in: they use a combination of extended tourist visas, periodic border runs, and when they’re ready to commit longer term, they get an agent and sort out a proper permit. Almost nobody is doing this perfectly by the book. Almost everyone is doing it well enough to live their lives. That’s the honest version.

One thing worth saying clearly: if you arrive on a tourist visa and immediately put your child in school and sign a year lease, you are already living here for immigration purposes, regardless of what your stamp says. The enforcement situation is not strict day to day, but it can become complicated if it ever becomes complicated. Most families navigate this fine. Some don’t. Having an agent from the beginning is worth the cost.

→ Full guide: [Bali Visas for Families — What You Actually Need and How to Get It]

The expat community

You will find your people faster than you expect.

Canggu has a dense expat community, particularly around the schools. CCS parent groups move fast. Someone posts that they need a recommendation for a pediatrician and they have six responses within an hour. Someone’s driver is sick and needs coverage and three people offer their own driver’s number. It works. I was skeptical of how useful these communities would actually be before we arrived, and I was wrong to be skeptical.

Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups do most of the infrastructure work. There are groups for Canggu families, for specific schools, for specific nationalities, for parents of kids in specific age ranges. It sounds overwhelming and it kind of is, but you find your two or three that are actually relevant and the rest become background noise.

The rhythm of the school year creates something you don’t anticipate: a social calendar that builds itself. New families arrive at the start of each term and the existing families absorb them quickly, because everyone remembers what it felt like to not know anyone. School pickup becomes a conversation. Conversations become playdates. Playdates become people you’d call if something went wrong. That part is real and it happened faster for us than it did anywhere we’d lived before.

There are also the harder social dynamics. Some of the expat community in Canggu is made up of people who are here for six months and then gone. You get used to goodbyes. Kids get used to goodbyes, which is both a useful skill for them to have and occasionally a sad one to watch. Rico Jr has had three good friends leave in eighteen months. He’s adapted. But there’s a thing where you stop investing as hard in new people until you know they’re staying, and that’s a slightly defensive posture that you develop without noticing.

What I’d also say, because I think it’s worth being honest about: it is a bubble. The expat community in Canggu is real and warm and useful, and it is also a community that spends a lot of time talking to itself about itself. You can spend years here and never build meaningful relationships with local Balinese people. That doesn’t happen automatically. You have to be intentional about it, and even then it requires something more than good intentions.

Dian navigating in Indonesian changes some of this for us. We eat at warungs where nobody on staff speaks English. We have real conversations with our neighbors. The kids hear Indonesian at home and are absorbing it. It doesn’t erase the bubble, but it puts holes in it. If you arrive without that, the bubble will be more complete, and you should go in knowing that.

Best areas for families

If you’re coming with kids and you want a life rather than a long holiday, these are the areas worth thinking about.

Canggu is where we are and where most of the expat family infrastructure is concentrated. CCS is here. The restaurant scene is here. The surf is here. It’s busy, it’s getting busier, and the traffic on the main roads at school run time is genuinely grim. It’s also the most functional area for the kind of life we live.

Seminyak is more polished and more expensive. It’s close to Canggu. Some families prefer it for the slightly calmer street situation. It’s harder to get a large villa with a garden at a reasonable price.

Sanur is quieter, more local in feel, and the home of Bali Island School for families on the IB track. It’s further from the surf culture of the west coast and the Canggu scene, which is either a feature or a bug depending on who you are.

Ubud is beautiful, cooler, and genuinely different in character. Green School is near here. It’s not a commute from Canggu, it’s a different choice of life. If you want nature, rice fields, less traffic, and you’re prepared to live without the beach ten minutes away, Ubud has real appeal. Some families love it completely.

We chose Canggu because of the schools, the surf for Rico Jr, and because Dian wanted the infrastructure of a place that can absorb a family of five without too much friction. I don’t think it’s objectively the best choice. I think it was the right one for us.

What we miss about home

Rico Jr misses Dutch weather during summer. That is a sentence I didn’t expect to write but he said it genuinely, because he spent most of last summer sweating through his school shirt and at some point he said he missed being cold.

I miss the healthcare system. In the Netherlands you call your GP and you see someone that week. In Bali, healthcare for expats means either the international clinics in Canggu or Seminyak, which are good but expensive and not always available for the specific thing you need, or doing a trip to Sanglah Hospital in Denpasar which is the public hospital and where the quality of care is variable depending on what you need. We have international health insurance, which is non-negotiable with children. If you’re coming here and you’re thinking about managing without it, don’t. → SafetyWing is what we use.

I miss being able to order something online and have it arrive in two days. Logistics here are improving but they are not Netherlands logistics. Some things take a week. Some things get lost. Some things simply cannot be sourced in Bali and have to come from Singapore or Jakarta, which adds cost and time.

I miss seasons. Genuinely. Bali has wet and dry, and wet season is not a small thing. It rains hard, every day, often in the afternoon. You get used to it and it’s fine. But there is something about autumn light in Europe that I find myself thinking about in October.

Dian misses her family’s cooking. She can make it herself, and she does. But the specific version of a dish that her mother makes is not reproducible. That’s not a Bali problem, it’s just a being-far-from-family problem.

What we’d never trade back

Risa Mia’s relationship with the warung ladies near our villa.

That’s the first thing I’d say. She is three, she is absolutely a force of nature, and she has a two-way relationship with three different women who run food stalls within two minutes of our house that involves more genuine warmth than most adult relationships I’ve watched form. They save her the good rambutans. She runs to them. There is no equivalent of this in the life we had before.

Rico Jr surfs before school some mornings. I want you to think about what it means for a twelve-year-old to have that as a normal Tuesday. He’s not a prodigy, he’s a kid who lives near the ocean and goes to it. But it’s his. It’s part of who he is now in a way it wouldn’t be anywhere else we’d realistically live.

The outdoor life for all three kids. Everything happens outside here. They play outside, they eat outside, they exist in the world in a way that kids in colder climates simply don’t for eight months of the year. Rosalia has made friends with kids from four different countries through school and her social life is genuinely more international at age six than mine was at twenty.

The pace, when we let ourselves have it. When it’s Sunday and we have nowhere to be and the pool is there and the whole day is slow, that is something we chose. We know what we chose it instead of.

Safety — what you actually need to know

I’ll keep this brief here because we have a full post on it, but the thing I’d say is: Bali is not inherently dangerous in the way some parents worry it is. Crime against tourists and expats is not a significant issue in our experience.

Traffic is the real risk. Bali traffic is dense, often unpredictable, and motorbikes are everywhere. Children on the school run need to be in a car, not on the back of a scooter. This is not a rule I’m making up. I’ve seen enough to take it seriously. If you’re a family with children and your plan involves everyone on bikes as a primary transport solution, I’d revisit that plan.

For anything medical, know where your nearest international clinic is before you need it. BIMC in Canggu and in Kuta, and Siloam in Denpasar, are the main references for serious things.

→ Full guide: [Is Bali Safe for Families]

Who this is right for, and who it isn’t

I’m not going to tell you to come to Bali. I’m not going to tell you it’s for everyone, because it isn’t.

This works well if: you have at least one person in the family who speaks Indonesian or is willing to learn enough to function. You have a realistic budget, and by realistic I mean not the backpacker version. You have children who are adaptable, not necessarily easy, adaptable. There’s a difference. Rosalia cried for a week about the school. Then she was fine. Then she was thriving. That kind of adaptable. You are prepared to do the visa administration without treating it as shameful or frightening. It’s bureaucracy. You deal with it.

It also works well if you can handle the Bali pace of ambiguity. Things here run differently. The contractor who says he’ll come Wednesday might come Friday. The water pressure will drop the morning you’re in a hurry. The internet goes out during important calls. The power cuts occasionally. None of it is catastrophic, none of it is frequent enough to be unbearable, but if any of those things would make you deeply unhappy rather than slightly irritated, that’s information worth having.

This does not work well if your income depends entirely on Western Europe or US infrastructure with no flexibility. If you have a child with specific medical needs that require specialist care, Bali can manage quite a lot but there are limits and they are real ones. If you need the predictability of European systems, water pressure that doesn’t fluctuate, roads that work after heavy rain, a GP who knows your file. None of those things are impossible here, but none of them are as simple as they are at home.

If you’re a family with very young children and no support system at all, the first few months can be genuinely hard. We had each other and Dian’s cultural knowledge and it was still a lot of information to process at once. Arrive with some margin in your schedule and your bank account. The families who struggle most in the first stretch are the ones who arrived on a very tight budget assuming things would sort themselves out quickly. Some things do. Some take longer.

If you have a partner who is Indonesian, the visa situation and cultural navigation are both significantly more manageable. That’s not a small thing. It shaped our entire experience and I want to be clear about that rather than pretending our path is the same as the path of a family arriving with no Indonesian connection at all.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to live in Bali with kids?

For a family of five living in Canggu with two children in international schools, we budget $5,000 to $9,000 per month. That includes villa rental, school fees, groceries, eating out, transport, domestic help, and utilities. The range is real. How you land within it depends on school choice and how much of your food budget goes to western imports.

Which schools are good for expat kids in Bali?

Canggu Community School is the most commonly chosen by Canggu families. Green School near Ubud is genuinely different and exceptional for the right child. Bali Island School in Sanur follows the IB curriculum. All of them have waiting lists. Contact schools before you arrive, not after.

What visa do families need to live in Bali long-term?

There’s no single clean answer. Most families use extended tourist visas plus periodic border runs while they sort out longer-term options. KITAS is more stable but requires a qualifying category. The E33G digital nomad visa is available with income requirements. Use a visa agent. Don’t rely on Facebook group advice from 2022.

Is Bali safe for kids?

Yes, with some caveats. Traffic is the main risk. Use cars, not scooters, for children. Have international health insurance. Know your nearest clinic. Crime against expats is low in our experience.

What’s the best area of Bali for families?

Canggu for the school infrastructure and surf culture. Sanur for a quieter pace and IB schooling. Ubud for nature and Green School. It depends what you’re optimizing for. None of them are wrong.

Do kids adapt well to living in Bali?

In our experience, faster than adults. Rico Jr found his social footing within weeks. Rosalia cried about school for a few days then made friends. Risa Mia runs the neighborhood. Kids have fewer preconceptions to manage.

Do you need to speak Indonesian?

Not to survive. Enough to be polite is easy to get to. Having Indonesian fluency in the household, as we do, changes the experience meaningfully. You’ll be in an expat bubble more completely without it.

A final thing

Last week I was working at the table near the pool and Rosalia came up behind me, put her arms around my neck, and said, “Papi, can we go to the warung for dinner?”

She said it the way kids say things that have become normal. The warung was already a piece of her world. She knows which table she likes, she knows which dish she wants, she knows the woman who runs it will give her extra krupuk if she asks.

She’s six. She has a local warung she calls hers, ten minutes from our gate.

I don’t know how long we’ll stay. We have a life here and it’s a real one. At some point things shift: school years end, visas become more complicated, family pulls from other directions. We don’t have a departure date. We also don’t have a forever plan.

What we have is this: three kids who are growing up with more of the world in them than they would anywhere else we could have chosen. And a Tuesday morning where the gecko falls off the ceiling and nobody looks up because we’ve been here long enough for that to be normal.

That’s the honest version.

Internal links

Links TO this post: [[Bali with Kids — Complete Family Guide]]
Links FROM this post: [[Is Bali Safe for Families]], [[Canggu with Kids]], [[Netherlands vs Bali — Living with a Family of 5]]

If you are planning living in bali with kids, everything in this post comes from real experience — not guides written from a hotel room.

NL version

NL Title: Leven op Bali met kinderen — scholen, kosten, veiligheid en wat wij leerden
NL URL: thehurtados.co/nl/leven-op-bali-met-kinderen/
NL Status: Not started

For more information, see the Expat.com Indonesia information.

Read next: whether Bali is safe for families.