Costs, stated plainly
What a medical thesis actually costs
There is no national price for a postgraduate thesis, and anyone who publishes one has guessed. What can be written down honestly is the list of things that cost money, what makes each of them move, and which person in your own institution holds the figure. That is this page, followed by our own fees, which are published in full.
- No invented figures
- Institution-specific lines marked as such
- Our own fees read from the published register
- We do not claim to be cheapest
Cost lines
Cost lines
What has to be paid for
Thirteen things that cost money, and who holds the figure
No amount on this page is estimated
Read this as a checklist rather than a budget. Each line says what it is, what makes the amount move, and the person who can give you a real number for your own institution.
A thesis is not one purchase. It is a dozen small ones spread over two years, most of them decided by your institution rather than by you, and the total depends far more on your study design than on your negotiating. The honest first sentence of any costing is this: before you can budget, you need your department's own rules in writing.
Two lines below deserve naming up front because students consistently worry about the wrong one. Registering a prospective interventional study with the Clinical Trials Registry of India costs nothing at all. Ethics committee approval, which must precede any data collection under the Indian Council of Medical Research's 2017 national ethical guidelines,[5] may or may not carry a review fee, and only your own committee can say.
- Ethics committee review
Some institutional ethics committees charge a fee to review a protocol. Some waive it for their own postgraduates, and some charge only when a revised protocol is reviewed again. There is no national schedule, so the only true answer is your own committee's.
What moves it Whether your institution charges students at all, and whether a revised protocol is reviewed again.
Ask The ethics committee secretary, when you collect the application format.
- Trial registration · CTRI
A prospective interventional study is registered with the Clinical Trials Registry of India. The registry states that there is no fee to register, and that registration must happen before the first participant is enrolled — a study cannot be registered after enrolment has begun.
What moves it Nothing. It costs nothing. What it costs you is lead time, so do it before you recruit.
Ask ctri.nic.in, and your guide, before recruitment starts.
- Investigations outside routine care
The line that can dwarf all the others, and the one your design controls completely. If your protocol measures something the patient would not have been tested for anyway, somebody has to pay for it. Your ethics committee will ask who, and the protocol has to answer.
What moves it Whether the measurement is part of standard care for that patient, how many participants need it, and whether your hospital performs it in-house or sends it out.
Ask Your guide and the head of the laboratory or imaging department, before you finalise the design.
- Kits, consumables and instruments
Scales, questionnaires under licence, assay kits, a specific suture, a calibrated instrument. Some are already in use in your department; some exist only for your study.
What moves it Whether the item is already stocked and calibrated, whether a validated questionnaire is free to use or licensed, and how many participants consume it.
Ask The department store in charge, and the copyright holder of any scale you plan to use.
- Printing drafts
Paper and toner, chapter by chapter, every time a draft goes to your guide on paper. Individually trivial and collectively not, because the number of printings is the number of revisions.
What moves it How many rounds the thesis goes through, and whether your guide reads on paper or on screen.
Ask Your guide, early: ask how they prefer to read a draft.
- Binding and copies
Hard binding with the title on the spine is the common expectation, but the colour, the lettering, the paper, the margins and the number of copies to be submitted are all set by your own university, and some now accept or require an electronic submission instead.
What moves it The number of copies your institution demands, the binder's rates in your city, and whether you have to rebind.
Ask Your department office, and get the written format document before you pay a binder.
- Similarity check
Your institution decides how this works. Where it holds a licence for a text-matching tool, the check is run through the library or the department and may cost you nothing; elsewhere a report is charged for. What matters more than the price is how many runs you are allowed before submission.
What moves it Your institution's licence, who is permitted to run it, and how many attempts you get before submission.
Ask The librarian or whoever holds the institutional account.
- Statistical help
Advice on the analysis plan, the sample size calculation, and the analysis itself. Some institutions have a department of community medicine or biostatistics that helps their own postgraduates at no charge.
What moves it Whether you ask before or after collecting data. A plan settled before collection is a conversation; a dataset that cannot answer its own question is a rescue, and rescues cost more and deliver less.
Ask Your department of community medicine or biostatistics first, before paying anyone outside.
- Translation and transcription
If your participants do not read the language your information sheet is written in, the sheet and the consent form have to be translated, and sometimes back-translated. Interviews recorded for a qualitative study have to be transcribed.
What moves it How many languages your committee requires, and how many hours of recording exist.
Ask The ethics committee, when it tells you which languages it expects.
- Reference manager and software
This is the line you can usually reduce to nothing. Zotero is free and open source, Mendeley has a free tier, and your institution may already hold an EndNote licence you are entitled to use. Ask about statistical software in the same conversation.
What moves it Whether you check what your institution already licenses before buying anything.
Ask The library or the IT office.
- Conference presentation
Regulation 5.2(x) of the NMC's 2023 postgraduate regulations requires one research activity before the final examination — a poster or podium presentation at a state, zonal or national conference of your own specialty, or a paper published or accepted in a journal of your specialty on which you are first author. A presentation means registration, travel, accommodation and printing a poster.
What moves it Whether the conference is state, national or international, how far you travel, and how early you register. Check the conference's own registration page for a postgraduate rate and an early deadline.
Ask The organising association's registration page, and your head of department about leave.
- Publication charges
Many journals charge the author nothing. Many open-access journals charge an article processing charge when a paper is accepted, and a legitimate journal publishes that amount on its instructions-to-authors page and asks for it after peer review, never as a condition of being reviewed.
What moves it The journal you choose, and nothing else. Find the figure before you submit, not after acceptance.
Ask The journal's own instructions to authors, and your librarian about whether the journal is sound.
- Board fees · DNB and DrNB only
The National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences publishes a thesis assessment fee, and a further fee for the late submission window at twenty-seven months. We do not print either amount here because they are revised with the board's own bulletins.
What moves it Whether you submit by twenty-six months or use the late window. The first option is cheaper in every sense.
Ask The current thesis guidelines on the board's own site, read against your joining date.
For DNB and DrNB candidates the board's own fees and its calendar — protocol within 180 days of joining, thesis by 26 months, a late window at 27 months on payment of a fee — are published by the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences and revised in its bulletins, so read the current version rather than a figure quoted anywhere else.[2]
Why it varies
Why it varies
The variation
Why nobody can publish a national figure
It is not modesty. The four things below move the total so far that a single number would mislead whoever believed it.
- Your institution sets most of it, and institutions do not agree.
- Review fees, the number of bound copies, which text-matching tool is used and how often, whether a statistician is available in-house, whether an electronic submission is accepted: every one of those is a local decision. Two postgraduates in the same city, in the same specialty, in the same year, can face genuinely different bills. This is why a national average would be a fiction even if someone collected one.
- The design decides the clinical cost before anything else does.
- A record review of patients already investigated costs almost nothing beyond your time. A prospective study that adds one test per participant carries that test multiplied by the sample size. An interventional study adds registration, closer monitoring and often a longer follow-up. The cheapest lever you will ever pull is choosing a feasible design in month three, not negotiating with a laboratory in month fourteen.
- Routine care is the line that decides who pays.
- If a measurement would have been ordered for that patient anyway, it is care and the usual arrangements apply. If it exists only because of your study, it is a research cost and your protocol must say who bears it. Ethics committees ask this directly, and a design that has no answer is a design that gets deferred.
- Your calendar has a price.
- Late costs money in specific, documented ways: a late-submission fee for a DNB or DrNB thesis, a second binding after a format rejection, an urgent statistician, an express courier, a conference registration at the full rate. Nearly every avoidable rupee in a thesis is spent buying back time that was available earlier and free.
So the useful question is not what does a thesis cost. It is which of my cost lines are fixed by my institution, which are fixed by my design, and which am I about to create by running late. The first group you can only find out. The second you control completely, in month three. The third is avoidable.
Choosing a design you can finish is therefore the largest financial decision in the whole project, which is why our own process starts there rather than with a quotation. The feasibility checklist our doctor panel uses sets out the six questions, and cost is one of them.
Avoidable
Avoidable
Waste
Six ways money leaves a thesis for nothing
Each of these is ordinary, each is avoidable, and each costs more than the thing that would have prevented it.
- Binding before you have the format document
- Margins, spine lettering, the order of the certificate pages and the number of copies are institutional. Getting them wrong means paying a binder twice. Ask for the written format, in writing, before the first copy is printed.
- Paying for a promised similarity percentage
- Nobody can promise you a number produced by a tool they do not operate, on an index they cannot see, under settings your institution chooses. A service that sells you a guaranteed figure is selling something it does not control.
- Paying a journal that does not review
- An unsolicited email, an instant acceptance and an invoice is the pattern. Before submitting anywhere, look the journal up in the databases it claims to be indexed in, read a recent issue, and check that the named editors hold the posts claimed. Since the University Grants Commission decided in 2024 to discontinue its own reference list of journals, this judgement sits with you, your guide and your librarian.
- Paying someone to write it
- The ICMJE's criteria require of every author a substantial contribution to the work, a hand in drafting it or revising it critically, approval of the version that is published, and accountability for all of it.[4] All four apply to you, and a thesis someone else wrote cannot meet them. The University Grants Commission's 2018 regulations on academic integrity set out penalties for misconduct in higher education institutions.[3] Under the NMC's 2023 regulations your thesis is judged inside the viva by an external examiner from outside the state, who will ask you about your own methods.[1]
- Buying statistics twice
- The most expensive analysis is the second one, commissioned after the first concluded that the data cannot answer the question. A sample size and an analysis plan settled before collection costs a fraction of a rescue and is worth more.
- Collecting variables nobody will analyse
- Every field on the proforma that does not appear in the analysis plan is time, consent-form length and often money. Write the analysis plan first, then build the proforma from it, and delete anything the plan does not use.
The pattern across all six is the same: each is a cost incurred because a question was asked late. The format document, the analysis plan, the journal's instructions to authors and the committee's fee schedule all exist before you need them, and all four are free to read.
Worksheet
Worksheet
Ten questions
Take this list to your department
Answer these ten and you have a real budget for your own thesis, which is more than any published figure can give you. None of them takes longer than a corridor conversation.
Questions to settle before month four
Ten questions
Does the ethics committee charge a review fee, and is there a separate fee for a resubmission?
Ask: Ethics committee secretary
Which investigations in my protocol are outside routine care, and who is recorded as paying for them?
Ask: Guide, and the laboratory or imaging head
Is the scale or questionnaire I plan to use free to use, or licensed?
Ask: The copyright holder named on the instrument
How many bound copies must be submitted, in what binding, and is an electronic copy accepted instead?
Ask: Department office — ask for the written format
Which text-matching tool does the institution use, who runs it, and how many times may I run it?
Ask: Librarian or the account holder
Is statistical advice available in-house to postgraduates, and at what stage should I come?
Ask: Community medicine or biostatistics
In which languages must the information sheet and consent form be provided?
Ask: Ethics committee
Which reference manager and statistical package does the institution already licence?
Ask: Library or IT office
Which conference satisfies the research activity requirement, and what is the postgraduate registration rate?
Ask: Head of department, and the association's site
For DNB and DrNB: what is the current thesis assessment fee, and the fee for the late window?
Ask: The board's current published guidelines
Ask for the answers to four, five and ten in writing. Those are the three that cost the most to get wrong, and a remembered conversation is not a format document.
The research activity, the research methodology course and GCP training that the National Medical Commission's 2023 regulations require before your final examination[1] each carry their own arrangements at your institution. Ask about those in the same conversation.
Our fees
Our fees
Professional help
What help with a thesis costs, including ours
Read from our own service register at request time
Having written the honest version of everything above, here is the part where we have an interest. We publish every fee we charge, in rupees, before you speak to anyone. Read it against the sections above and decide for yourself.
Paid help with a thesis covers a wide range of things. At one end, an hour of statistical advice or a language edit of a finished draft. At the other, the arrangement we offer: a senior doctor in your specialty and a medical writer who stay with the project from topic to submission, with the drafts, the comments and the deadlines on one record. Those are different purchases and they should not be compared on price alone.
Other services exist, and many of them publish no figure at all. Where a fee is not published the only way to compare is to ask for a written scope and a written figure — and if a scope is not written down, it is not a scope. We make no claim about anyone else's work, we name no competitor, and we do not claim to be the cheapest. What we claim is that our figures are on the site rather than in a chat window.
- Topic & Synopsis
₹14,999
Typical duration 7–10 days
Three vetted topics, then a full synopsis in your university format
- 3 vetted topic options with feasibility notes
- Literature gap analysis
- Full synopsis in your university format
- Sample-size calculation with justification
- Ethics committee application draft
- 2 rounds of revision
- Data Analysis & Statistics
₹12,999
Typical duration 5–7 days
SPSS or R analysis by a biostatistician
- Master chart cleaning & coding
- Test selection with rationale
- Tables, graphs and figures
- Results chapter write-up
- Viva-ready explanation call
- 1 round of re-analysis
- Complete Thesis Mentorship
₹49,999
Typical duration 45–90 days
Synopsis to submission, with your doctor & writer
- Dedicated doctor mentor from your specialty
- Professional medical writer
- All chapters: introduction to summary
- Statistics with SPSS/R output
- MDSoftune word-level similarity report with every draft version
- Revisions until your guide signs off
- Thesis Review & Editing
₹9,999
Typical duration 5–7 days
Scientific editing and formatting to your university's rules
- Scientific & language editing
- Structure and flow improvements
- Vancouver/ICMJE reference fix
- University formatting
- Plagiarism reduction
- Tracked changes + summary
- Plagiarism Check & Reduction
₹4,999
Typical duration 2–3 days
Word-level similarity report and ethical rewriting
- Similarity report
- Source-wise breakdown
- Ethical paraphrasing
- Citation fixes
- Final re-check report
- Publication Support
₹19,999
Typical duration 10–14 days
Thesis to manuscript, formatted and submitted to an indexed journal
- Thesis-to-manuscript conversion
- Journal shortlist (indexed)
- Author-guideline formatting
- Cover letter
- Reviewer response support
- Submission assistance
How to read these figures
The rupee amount is the amount charged, and it is the same figure the schedule of fees publishes, read from the same register. That page also carries the payment terms — milestone instalments against delivery — and a currency switcher if you need an indicative figure in your own currency. None of these fees includes anything your institution charges you, and none of them buys an outcome.
Scope
Scope
The boundary
What the fee includes, and what it will never include
The second column matters more than the first. A fee that quietly implies it covers your institution's charges, or an outcome, is the commonest way a published price turns out to be untrue.
Included in every fee
No upgrade
- The feasibility call
- A senior doctor reads where your thesis stands and tells you what to do next. There is no fee for it and no obligation after it.
- The MDSoftune report
- A word-level uniqueness report ships with every draft version, and it is included in the fee for every service. It is never sold as an extra.
- Every version, kept
- Numbered draft versions, pinned comments and the stage tracker are part of the service, not a premium tier. There is no paid upgrade to see your own record.
- The fee is published before you speak to anyone
- Every figure is on the pricing page and on each service page, in rupees, with its scope, and with a typical duration wherever the register publishes one. Nothing is quoted privately at a different number.
Never included, by anyone
Yours to pay or nobody's to sell
- Anything your institution charges
- Ethics committee fees, binding, copies, similarity-check charges and board fees are paid by you to your own institution or board. We do not collect them and we cannot reduce them.
- Clinical costs
- Investigations, kits, consumables and anything done to a participant are part of your study and your institution's arrangements, never part of our fee.
- Publication charges
- If you choose a journal that charges an article processing charge, that is between you and the journal. We will not pay it, and we will not recommend paying one to a journal that does not review.
- A grade, an approval or a percentage
- No fee buys acceptance of your thesis, a mark, a publication, or a similarity figure from a system we do not operate. Any service that prices one of those is pricing something it does not own.
Where we are genuinely the answer, and where we are not
If your difficulty is a design that will not survive an ethics committee, a sample size you cannot justify, a draft that has stalled, or a calendar you are already behind, that is the work we do and the fee above is what it costs. Say so on the feasibility call and a senior doctor will tell you which service fits, or that none of them does.
If what you need is one hour with a statistician your own department can provide, or the format document from your own office, you do not need us and we will say so. A page about cost that cannot bring itself to say that is an advertisement.
We mentor, edit and analyse. You remain the sole author of your thesis, and our contribution belongs in your acknowledgements rather than your author line.
The same commitments, in summary
Protection of your work
Row-level security
Every table enforces row-level access. You read your own record, and nothing else.
View-only streaming
Drafts are streamed to you through an authenticated route, not handed over as a file.
Watermarked to you
Every page you read carries your own name and email across it.
Download gated
The final file unlocks when the fee is settled in full, and not before.
Mumbai region · DPDP 2023
Your record and your documents are held in the Mumbai region, so India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 applies to them.
Anonymised data only
We accept no patient identifiers. An NDA is available on request.
Instruments we work to
NMC PGMER-2023
The thesis obligations set out in the postgraduate medical education regulations.
NBEMS
DNB and DrNB protocol and thesis timelines, and the page limit, as published.
UGC 2018 · <10%
The academic integrity convention we work to on every draft.
ICMJE · Vancouver
Authorship criteria and reference style, applied as published.
No affiliation
We work to these published instruments. We are affiliated to none of the bodies that issue them.
Authorship and the uniqueness check
Sole author
Mentoring, editing, statistics and compliance. You remain the sole author of your thesis.
Not ghostwriting
We will not write your thesis for you, and we will not be named in it.
MDSoftune
Word-level uniqueness checking, built with REDENN Informatics Inc., Canada.
Every version
Each draft is checked word by word before your university sees it.
MDThesis is an independent academic mentorship practice. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for the NMC, NBEMS, UGC or any university.
Free feasibility call
Tell us where your thesis stands. A senior doctor will tell you what to do next.
A senior doctor replies within one working day. No obligation. MD, MS, DNB, DrNB, DM, MCh, MDS and international programmes.
Request for a feasibility call
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Document: Cost of a medical thesis · Revision 1 · Last reviewed
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