TL;DR
- Tighter student visas cut IDP’s placements from almost 100,000 to 54,000 in two years.
- Its profit fell from A$149 million to A$13 million.
- IDP has cut a fifth of its staff and runs far fewer IELTS test centers.
For many students in India and the rest of Asia, study abroad is also a way to work and settle in another country. But whether they can go is decided by the countries they want to study in.
IDP Education’s business is built on that. It co-owns IELTS, one of the English tests Canada, the UK and Australia require from students, and universities pay it a commission for every student it places.
Over the last two years, those countries and the US tightened their student visas, and IDP placed far fewer students abroad. Its share price is down 94% over the last five years.
I started looking at IDP because of a different question. In 2025, Duolingo English Test revenue fell for the first time since at least 2020. Was that just Duolingo, or are fewer people taking English tests?
To find out, I went through IDP’s annual reports from FY18 to FY26. IDP’s financial year ends in June, so FY26 means July 2025 to June 2026. IDP’s figures are in Australian dollars.
IDP’s numbers answer part of that question. They also show how much the business of study abroad depends on visas.
How IDP Makes Money
A student in India who wants to study abroad may deal with IDP twice.
First, for the English test. IDP runs IELTS test centers, and the student pays to sit the test there.
Then, for the application. An IDP counselor helps the student pick a university and apply. IDP can also help with the practical things, like accommodation, insurance and even a SIM card.
The student pays for the test. The university pays IDP a commission for every student it sends, and IDP calls each of these a placement. IDP also sells universities ads, events, student data and space at its study-abroad fairs.
IELTS and placement each bring in about half of IDP’s revenue. A small English teaching business, mainly in Cambodia, makes up most of the rest.
IDP is older than IELTS. It started in 1969 as an aid program run by Australian universities for universities in Southeast Asia. In 1989, it helped launch IELTS with the British Council and Cambridge, its fellow co-owners. It pays Cambridge a fee for every test.
Today it sends students to Australia, the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Malaysia and the UAE, and at its peak it had more than 200 placement offices.
Both big businesses start with the same person: a student who wants to study abroad. When fewer of them get a visa, IDP loses on the test and on the placement.
Visas Tightened, Placements Fell
After COVID, students came back in big numbers. By FY24, IDP was placing 98,900 students a year at universities abroad, twice as many as before the pandemic.
Then the visas tightened. In two years, IDP’s placements fell to 54,200, about where they were before COVID.
Canada is the clearest example. It capped the number of new international students, asked for more visa documents and took away the right to work after graduation for some of them.
Study permits for Indian students fell from about 278,000 in 2023 to about 95,000 in 2025. IDP’s drop was even steeper: for every ten students it sent to Canada in FY24, it sent about one in FY26.
The other countries tightened in their own ways, and IDP’s placements followed:
- UK: Indian students got 16% fewer study visas, and IDP’s UK placements fell by about a fifth in each of the last two years.
- US: Fewer Indian students enrolled, and IDP’s US placements fell by two-thirds in FY26.
- Australia: The fee to apply for a student visa nearly tripled, to A$2,000, and IDP’s placements there fell by about a fifth before leveling off.
Overall, Indian government figures show about 30% fewer Indian students left to study abroad in 2025 than in 2023.
IDP’s revenue points the same way: since FY24, all of the drop has come from Asia, while the rest of the world held steady.
Fewer Students, Fewer Tests
Fewer students going abroad means fewer people need an English test. Canada, the UK and Australia require students to take an English test such as IELTS, while the US government doesn’t.
IELTS took the same path as placements, but peaked a year earlier. IDP ran nearly 2 million tests in FY23. By FY26, it ran 1.2 million, fewer than before COVID.
IDP doesn’t publish test numbers for India. But it does compare its Indian tests with Indian visa applications to Australia, the UK and Canada, and the two have fallen together:
- First half of FY25: both down by about half from a year earlier.
- FY26: both down by about a quarter.
I had expected Indian students who couldn’t go to the US to pick the UK instead, which would have helped IDP. It didn’t happen. More Indian students wanted to go to the UK in 2025, but the UK gave out fewer visas, so wanting to go wasn’t enough.
Visas weren’t the only problem in Canada. In 2023, it started accepting three more English tests for a key student visa route, so IELTS had more competition.
IELTS revenue fell too, but less than the number of tests: since FY23, down 29%, against 38% for tests, because IDP earned more from each test.
Duolingo English Test revenue also kept growing until 2024, then fell in 2025. So it isn’t just Duolingo: fewer students are going abroad, and fewer of them need an English test.
Why Revenue Held Up
IDP’s revenue fell far less than its placements. From FY24 to FY26, placements fell 45%, while revenue fell 23%, to A$795 million.
Three things cushioned the drop:
- More from each student and each test. IDP earned about A$5,600 for each student it placed in FY26, about A$1,000 more than in FY24. Each IELTS test brought in about A$325 on average, up from A$305.
- Tests fell less than placements. IELTS brings in about half of IDP’s revenue, and over these two years, tests fell by about a quarter, while placements fell by almost half.
- Its smaller businesses held steady. Revenue from English teaching and from marketing to universities barely changed.
The higher revenue per student came, IDP said, from raising its prices, universities raising their tuition, and more students going to countries with higher fees. Since universities, not students, pay IDP a commission for each student, higher tuition means a bigger commission.
All this softened the fall in revenue, but it wasn’t enough to protect profit.
Where the Profit Went
IDP’s profit fell much further than its revenue because its costs were built for a boom. In FY23, IDP kept about 15 cents of every dollar it brought in as profit. By FY26, it kept less than 2 cents.
When students came back after COVID, IDP grew to meet them. It went from 157 placement offices in FY22 to 203 a year later and kept adding more, so every kind of cost went up, from staff to marketing to the service providers that deliver IELTS. Costs rose so fast that profit started falling in FY24, even while revenue was still growing.
Then revenue fell faster than IDP could cut. From FY24 to FY26, revenue fell 23%, while staff costs fell only about 10%. IDP was placing far fewer students but still paying for a business built for many more.
In Asia, IDP’s biggest region, profit was squeezed even harder, partly because the fee IDP pays Cambridge for every test goes up each year.
Australasia went the other way, and profit there rose. IDP credited more IELTS tests in Australia, higher revenue and keeping costs down, though it didn’t say where the savings came from.
How IDP Is Cutting Back
Across the whole company, though, profit had almost gone, so IDP has been shrinking the business, and the cuts have grown each year.
They started small in 2024, when IDP began cutting costs and said this wouldn’t change where it operates. That didn’t last. In FY25, it left its English schools in Vietnam after competition and a shift to shorter, cheaper courses hurt revenue.
In FY26, the cuts got much bigger:
- Staff: about 1,250 roles went, roughly a fifth of IDP’s people.
- Regions: five became three, which IDP said removed “duplication of roles.”
- Countries: it closed its Iran operations and left “some” IELTS countries, without naming them.
For learners, the biggest change is the test centers. IDP’s CEO said it went from about 1,500 IELTS centers to under 600. Not all of the others closed, though: in some markets, local partners now run them and the test is still available, while in others IDP left.
Getting smaller costs money too. IDP spent A$36 million on restructuring in FY26 and expects to spend about as much again in FY27.
The cuts reached executives and shareholders as well. IDP halved its executives’ bonuses in FY25 and now ties 40% of their bonus to cutting costs, while shareholders saw the dividend fall from 14 cents to 9 cents a share.
IDP’s Plan for Fewer Students
Shareholders have lost far more than their dividend. The stock market already values IDP as a much smaller company. All its shares together are now worth about A$630 million.
In September 2026, Blackstone offered A$2.50 a share, more than the shares trade for today. The board rejected it, saying the offer “substantially undervalues” the company.
IDP isn’t the only education company to lose most of its value. By the time Coursera agreed to buy Udemy in February 2026, the two had lost US$8 billion in combined market value since going public, and 2U, which bought edX for US$800 million, filed for bankruptcy in 2024.
IDP itself expects another hard year. For FY27, it forecasts lower profit because it assumes student numbers in its markets will fall another 20% to 30%.
Its plan is to keep charging more and spending less. For growth, it’s betting on three things:
- China, where it expects to add a lot of profit over time.
- Malaysia and the UAE, its newer destinations.
- AI tools, including ones for counseling students and for running Envoy, its own AI-powered English test.
IDP can raise its fees and cut its costs. It can’t issue a single visa.
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