“How much does surrogacy cost?” That’s the question I’ve been asked most often over the past two years. Honestly, there’s no standard answer. One family wrapped everything up for 450,000 RMB; another spent 700,000 and still hadn’t brought their baby home. The difference isn’t luck — it’s whether you did the math line by line. Below are the traps I watched more than a dozen families hit while building their budgets.
A Quote With One Number Is a Quote You Shouldn’t Sign Yet
Many agencies hand you a single figure: 550,000 RMB, all inclusive. I always take that sheet home and take it apart. For IVF plus surrogacy in Georgia, a realistic budget has four buckets. Medical: 250,000 to 300,000 RMB, covering stimulation, egg retrieval, embryo culture, transfer, and pregnancy check-ins. Surrogate compensation and pregnancy allowance: 120,000 to 150,000. Legal paperwork and attorney fees: 50,000 to 80,000. Your own food, lodging, and transport on the ground: 30,000 to 50,000. Added up, around 500,000 is the normal water level. Below 450,000, worry about add-ons later. Above 650,000, someone is padding the margin.
What you can do today: make the agency list the four buckets separately, write them into the contract as an attachment, and require written approval before any bucket goes over. Verbal promises count for nothing.
The Night of the Trigger Shot Is Worth Thousands — or a 30,000 Loss
The trigger shot (HCG) is timed to the hour. Your doctor will tell you to inject at an exact evening time — too early and the eggs aren’t mature, too late and they’ve already released. I watched one woman who hadn’t adjusted to the time zone inject 40 minutes late. That cycle was cancelled outright, and the 30,000-plus RMB she’d spent on stimulation vanished with it.
The shot itself is cheap — a few hundred to 1,000 RMB. But it decides whether the previous ten days of medication actually pay off. Stimulation drugs run about 1,500 RMB per dose, nearly 20,000 over ten days. My practical tips: convert the injection time to Beijing time and set two alarms. After the injection, have your companion check the drug and the exact time, and send a photo to the nurse station for confirmation.
How Long Does IVF Take? Your Hotel Bill Decides
People ask how long IVF takes. The medical flow is only about 28 days: 10 to 12 days of stimulation, 2 days of rest after retrieval, then transfer depending on lining. But Georgia requires two trips — one for stimulation and retrieval, one to bring the baby home. What most people forget: the two trips add up to 45 to 60 days on the ground. At 350 RMB per night, that’s 16,000 to 21,000 in accommodation alone, flights not included.
Here’s what actually saves money: fly on day 2 of your period instead of waiting in-country for it, which burns a week of hotel fees for nothing. After retrieval, if there’s no bloating or fluid, you can fly home on day 3 and move the waiting period back to China. That alone cuts your lodging nearly in half — enough to cover three months of later luteal support medication.
Post-Transfer Care Hides a Three-Month Expense
Post-transfer advice usually gets flattened into “rest more.” The real cost sits behind it: luteal support runs 8 to 12 weeks, and injections plus oral medication cost 3,000 to 5,000 RMB per month — roughly 10,000 for the full course. Some people buy these drugs at local Georgian pharmacies at triple the Chinese price. Bring the doctor’s prescription home and fill it at your local pharmacy; the same injection can be 40% cheaper per vial.
One more thing: don’t rush onto a plane after transfer. Rest at least 48 hours. I know someone who caught a red-eye two days after retrieval, ended up hospitalized with ovarian hyperstimulation, and paid another 20,000 RMB — more than the entire flight budget.
If you’re running these numbers right now, do it my way: take one sheet of paper, draw four columns — medical, surrogate, legal, living — and set aside a separate 10% contingency fund. The trigger shot’s clock, the trip’s day count, and post-transfer luteal support look like small details, but they’re exactly where budgets spin out of control. Spending one evening on this math before departure beats haggling over every line item on foreign soil.