Palliative care is specialized medical and nursing care for terminally ill patients in terms of preserving dignity and integrity of the person as a whole. While it is aimed at alleviating suffering and preserving the best possible quality of life until death on the one hand, it also provides the family members with psychological support and necessary counselling service. This paper is a cross-sectional study that involves fourth-grade students from a medical school and a general-program secondary school in the city of Zagreb. The purpose of the paper is to investigate and compare their knowledge on the subject of palliative care. The study was conducted in the period from February 14 to March 13, 2019. The study involved 178 students, 52.2% of them were from medical schools, and 47.8% from the other secondary schools. Two thirds of the respondents were females. Among the respondents from the vocational school there were fewer male participants. The results of the research have shown that the medical school students have statistically significantly higher knowledge of palliative care compared to the students from the other school (p=0.005), which means that there is a statistically significant difference in the observed schools. There are 95.7% accurate answers of the medical school students, whilst the other school scored 85.9%. More than half of the respondents (59.0%) have already faced the experience of death and dying in their family. However, the results show that there is no statistically significant difference in the knowledge of palliative care among respondents who have experienced death of a close person and those who have not. This research has shown that there is a satisfactory level of knowledge on the subject in both schools. However, it is necessary to provide ongoing palliative care education, especially in medical schools, as life expectancy of the population is increasing. It has also been shown that there is no correlation between students’ knowledge on palliative care and their experience of death and dying in the family.