The paper investigated parents’ perception on the effects of the rising cost of living and access to quality secondary education in Rivers State. Three research questions were raised and answered and three hypotheses were tested in the study. The design employed for the study was descriptive survey. The population of the study consisted of all parents in the 302 public senior secondary schools in Rivers State while convenience sampling technique was used to select 284 parents, who volunteered to participate in the study. The instrument adopted for collection of data was a 15- item questionnaire titled “Parents Perception on the Effects of Rising Cost of Living and Access to Quality Secondary Education Questionnaire”. The instrument was face and content validated by three Measurement and Evaluation experts from the Department of Educational Psychology, Guidance and Counselling, University of Port Harcourt. The reliability of the instrument was estimated using Cronbach alpha and it yielded a coefficient of 0.89. Out of the 284 copies of the questionnaire administered, 279 copies from 78 males and 201 females were retrieved which represented 98.2% retrieval rate. The research questions raised were answered using mean and standard deviation while the hypotheses were tested using t-test at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study indicated that the parents perceived that quality education comes at a high cost. It was revealed among others that high living cost affects enrollment of children and transition to higher education. The need for scholarship and social security services were identified as mitigating measures for accessing quality secondary education. However, a significant difference existed in the opinion of the sampled parents. It was recommended that allocation to public education should be improved to make it more accessible and qualitative.