The quantum cost is a key ingredient to evaluate the quality of quantum protocols from a practical viewpoint. We show that the quantum cost of d-dimensional dense coding protocol is equal to d + 3 when transmitting the classical message (0, 0), and that is equal to d + 4 when transmitting other classical message. It appears linear growth with the dimension and thus makes sense for implementation. In contrast, the quantum cost of high-dimensional teleportation protocols is equal to 13, which is the maximum value of the cost for the two-dimensional case. As an application, we establish the relation between the quantum cost and fidelity of dense coding protocols in terms of four typical noise scenario.