Yellow Fever Vaccine Cost: €73, £70 or $250, and Who Pays

A yellow fever jab costs €72.92 for the vaccine at Munich's university hospital.¹ An English general practitioner (GP) practice charges £70, certificate included.² A university travel clinic in Oregon charges $250.³

Who pays matters more than the sticker price. In Germany, many statutory health insurers refund travel vaccines.⁴ In the UK, the NHS gives four for free and leaves the rest to private clinics.⁵ In the US, the Oregon clinic says most insurers reimburse most travel services.³ This article compares the price lists of three clinics, one in each country, and the funding rules behind them.

Three clinics, one price list each

The Munich prices are pharmacy prices for the vaccine.¹ The hospital adds €14 per injection and €40 for a travel consultation.¹ The Oregon clinic adds $25 for the first injection and $18 for each one after that.³ The English list is from March 2025, the Munich list from August 2026.²¹

Germany: refunds are voluntary, and common

German statutory health insurers do not have to pay for travel vaccines. They may offer them as an extra benefit written into their own rules.⁴ The comparison site krankenkassen.de lists 48 insurers, and about 43 of them refund both the doctor and the vaccine in full.⁴ Many cap the total. AOK Baden-Württemberg, for example, pays up to €300 a calendar year.⁴

Techniker Krankenkasse, one of the largest, sets three conditions.⁶ The trip must be private. Germany's standing vaccination committee must recommend the jab for the destination. And a doctor contracted to the statutory system, or a public health office, must give it. The traveller pays 10% of the vaccine price, at least €5 and at most €10.⁶

On those terms, a two-dose Japanese encephalitis course at Munich prices costs a Techniker member a €10 co-payment per dose on the vaccine. Without cover it would cost €257.76 for the vaccine alone.¹

Not every insurer is that generous. Stiftung Warentest, the German consumer testing foundation, found in 2025 that some insurers pay from a vaccination budget of €150 to €200 a year.⁷ That is lower than the caps of €250 to €500 that krankenkassen.de lists, and the two sites looked at different sets of insurers.⁴ One insurer in its 2025 comparison covered only the meningococcal B vaccine and no other travel jabs.⁷

UK: four free, the rest private

The NHS gives four travel vaccines free at a GP surgery, after a risk assessment form.⁵ They protect against cholera, polio, hepatitis A and typhoid fever.⁵ Hepatitis B, Japanese encephalitis, rabies, tick-borne encephalitis and yellow fever are not routinely available on the NHS.⁵

So the private part of a British traveller's bill is the expensive part. The Dr Jefferies & Partners practice charges £110 per dose of Japanese encephalitis vaccine, or £220 for the course.² Rabies is £100 a dose, or £300 for three.²

For yellow fever, the comparison site TreatCompare gives a typical range of £60 to £100.⁸ The practice's £70 sits inside it, and it charges £25 to reissue a lost certificate.² TreatCompare notes that some clinics charge £25 to £50 for a consultation on top.⁸

US: it depends on the plan

The Oregon Health & Science University clinic charges $100 for an office visit before any vaccine.³ It says most insurers will reimburse most travel medicine services, and gives patients an itemised receipt to claim with.³ That is the clinic's own description, not a survey of insurers.

Prices also vary between clinics. The University of Georgia health centre listed yellow fever at $225, Japanese encephalitis at $350 and rabies at $400, in a schedule revised in February 2023.⁹ Its hepatitis A dose was $90 and its typhoid injection $125, about half the Oregon prices.⁹ Those are vaccine charges only, on top of a visit fee of $50 to $110.⁹

What the headline numbers leave out

Three clinics are not three markets. Each column in the table above is one clinic's list. Another clinic in the same city may charge more or less.

A course is not a dose. Rabies needs three doses on the English practice's list, and Japanese encephalitis needs two.² Comparing single-dose prices understates what a traveller pays.

The vaccine itself is cheap at scale. UNICEF, the UN children's agency, pays about $1.53 to $1.67 a dose for Sanofi's yellow fever vaccine in 2026.¹⁰ That price is for multi-dose vials bought for countries eligible for Gavi, the vaccine alliance, so it is not a price a traveller can get. It is a reference point for how much of a clinic bill is something other than the vaccine.

A refund is not a discount at the counter. Under the German rules, a traveller often pays first and then claims, so the full price still has to be paid up front.⁴

How to use these numbers

In Germany, ask your insurer before booking whether it refunds travel vaccines, and whether it caps them. Keep the invoice, and have the jab given by a practice or office that meets your insurer's conditions.⁶

In the UK, ask your GP surgery for the four free vaccines first. Pay privately only for the ones the NHS does not cover.⁵

In the US, call your insurer with the vaccine names before the appointment. Ask the clinic for an itemised receipt.³