Education Savings Account Statistics 2026: Programs, Students and Funding by State

Eighteen states have established 21 directly state-funded K–12 education savings account programs as of July 31, 2026. A broader definition that includes three tax-credit ESA programs produces 24 programs across 19 unique states, because Florida and Utah appear in both categories and Missouri appears only in the tax-credit category.

The program count runs higher than the state count for a simple reason: some states operate more than one. Florida has two directly funded programs. Tennessee has three.

The 18 states with directly funded programs: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Directly funded versus tax-credit ESAs

The distinction matters and it is regularly collapsed.

A directly funded ESA routes state education funding into an authorized account that a family can use for approved educational expenses. The exact funding mechanism varies by state, but the account exists through a state-created public program.

A tax-credit ESA works differently. Individuals or businesses make eligible contributions to scholarship-granting organizations and receive state tax credits. The scholarship-granting organizations then fund authorized family accounts.

The National Conference of State Legislatures keeps the two categories in separate inventories, and we keep them separate here. The three tax-credit ESA programs are Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship, Missouri’s MOScholars program and Utah’s Carson Smith Opportunity Scholarship.

When a source says “21 programs in 18 states,” it is counting only the directly funded programs. When a source says “24,” it is counting both categories. Both scopes can be used. Mixing them silently cannot.

Why older articles report a smaller number

The count moved quickly. Ten of the 18 direct-ESA states enacted their first directly funded program from 2023 through 2025. A source published before those enactments can be accurate for its date and still be wrong as a current count. Check the scope and publication date before using any national ESA number.

No date-aligned official national total is currently reproducible from the states’ public reporting. Some states disclose participating or funded students; others disclose awards, reserved seats, eligible or approved applicants, applications, or nothing at all. Those figures answer different questions and cannot be added into one student count.

This is not a technicality. The distance between an application, an approval, an award and a used account is large enough to change the answer by tens of thousands of students.

What the program funnel looks like where states publish it

This dataset establishes how many programs exist under the two stated scopes, how they are legally structured, when they were enacted, what each state currently reports and what published award structures look like. It does not establish academic effects, net fiscal effects or whether an ESA caused a student to leave a public school.

What the data supports:

• Program and state counts: 21 directly funded programs in 18 states; 24 programs in 19 states when tax-credit ESAs are included.
• Eligibility structure: 12 direct programs classified as universal and nine as targeted.
• Recent enactment: 11 direct programs were enacted from 2023 through 2025.
• State-specific participation and demand: the latest reported count for each program, with its metric and period left attached.
• State-specific capacity pressure: 56,440 Tennessee applications for 35,000 reserved seats, more than 8,800 students waitlisted in Utah, nearly 145,000 students waitlisted in Texas as of June 10 and South Carolina reaching its 15,000-student statutory capacity.
• Award structure: fixed awards, tiers, ranges and formulas, reported without forcing them into one national average.

What the data does not support:

• A comparable national student total.
• A standardized national spending total.
• A causal conclusion about academic outcomes.
• A national public-school “switcher rate.”
• A conclusion about the net fiscal effect on a state or school district.
• A conclusion about parent satisfaction or typical student outcomes.

RAND’s 2024 review reached a narrower but important conclusion about academic research: no state in its review met all four conditions RAND identified as necessary for a rigorous causal evaluation of ESA academic effects at that time. That does not establish that ESAs help or harm achievement. It establishes that the available program conditions and data did not support the causal study RAND described.

We defined the national program universe from the National Conference of State Legislatures’ separate inventories of directly funded and tax-credit ESA programs, then checked each program against its administering agency, state treasurer, legislative record, official report or authorized program administrator for the latest participation and award data available as of July 31, 2026. Every row carries a metric type, reporting period, primary source and verification date.

We started with NCSL because it supplies a program-by-program legislative inventory, identifies the establishing law and separates directly funded ESAs from tax-credit ESAs. Then we went state by state for current operating data.

What we recorded, and what we refused to do

We recorded the exact word or status published by the source. “Students enrolled,” “accounts funded,” “scholarships awarded,” “seats reserved,” “eligible applicants” and “applications” are different things. We do not treat them as interchangeable.

We did not convert “more than,” “nearly” or “up to” into exact numbers. We did not infer zero from the absence of a report. We did not average tiered or formula-based awards into a number that no state publishes. And we did not add unlike state metrics into one national student total.

Source hierarchy

We used sources in this order and moved down only when a higher tier did not publish the needed current fact:

1. Official administering agency or state treasurer.
2. Enacted statute, official regulation or legislative fiscal document.
3. Official annual, quarterly, audit or program report.
4. State-authorized program administrator, where the state delegates administration.
5. NCSL for national legal classification and enactment history.
6. Secondary research for context and disagreement detection, not as a substitute for official state data.

Where official sources disagree or use different periods

Florida FES Unique Abilities:Florida’s Department of Education reported 121,907 scholarships for 2024–25. Step Up For Students, a state-authorized scholarship funding organization, reports 140,147 funded scholarship students for 2025–26. Those are different years and different publishers. The main row uses the newer administrator count and preserves the state’s prior-year figure beside it.

Missouri MOScholars:The official report’s narrative and Table 1 report 6,411 participants in 2025–26, while one figure caption says 2,693. We use 6,411 because it appears in the narrative and summary table, and we disclose the internal error.

Arizona:The state’s current page reports 100,208 enrolled for 2026–27 as of July 27 and explicitly says the figure will not stabilize until September. The prior quarterly report counted 102,891 at March 31. We publish the current provisional figure and preserve the prior-quarter benchmark.

Montana: The latest official program-wide participation count located was 75 students as of July 16, 2025. OPI later announced that a court stay permitted reimbursements only through June 30, 2026, and a state appeal docket remained open. The row therefore preserves the dated participation count without implying that it is a current July 2026 operating count.

Calculation rules

• Each legally distinct program counts once.
• Unique states are counted separately from programs.
• Direct and tax-credit ESA categories stay separate.
• Florida’s two direct programs count as two programs and one state. Tennessee’s three count as three programs and one state.
• Florida and Utah are already represented in the direct count, so adding the tax-credit category adds only Missouri to the unique-state count.
• Percentages are calculated from unrounded counts and displayed to one decimal place.
• Formula-based awards are labeled formula-based. Estimated or not-yet-final amounts are not converted into final figures.
• Each source’s school-year or fiscal-year terminology is retained.
• A newer award can appear beside an older participant count when that is the latest combination the state has published; both periods remain visible.

Dataset fields and versioning

The downloadable dataset records:

state · program · program_type · eligibility_class · enactment_year · operating_status · latest_metric_type · latest_metric_value · latest_metric_label · reporting_period · award_min · award_max · award_formula_or_tiers · source_publisher · source_title · source_date · source_url · verified_date · data_quality_note

Dataset version: 2026-07-31
Snapshot date: July 31, 2026
Next scheduled full review: January 2027

Dataset versions are archived rather than silently overwritten, so a number used from a dated release remains recoverable after the live page changes. Download the CSV: education-savings-account-statistics-2026-07-31.csv

Twelve of the 21 directly funded programs — 57.1% — are classified as universal under current or fully implemented law. Nine are targeted by disability status, income, school assignment, prior enrollment or another eligibility rule. Universal legal eligibility does not mean unlimited funding or a guaranteed award.

The 12 universal direct programs

Alabama CHOOSE Act · Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account · Arkansas Educational Freedom Account · Florida FES Educational Options · Iowa Students First ESA · Louisiana LA GATOR · New Hampshire Education Freedom Account · Tennessee Education Freedom Scholarship · Texas Education Freedom Accounts · Utah Fits All Scholarship · West Virginia Hope Scholarship · Wyoming Steamboat Legacy Scholarship

The nine targeted direct programs

Disability-focused: Florida FES Unique Abilities · Mississippi Equal Opportunity for Students with Special Needs · Montana Special Needs Equal Opportunity ESA · North Carolina ESA+ · Tennessee Individualized Education Account

Income-focused: South Carolina Education Scholarship Trust Fund

Disability and income: Indiana Education Scholarship Account

Other or mixed statutory criteria: Georgia Promise Scholarship · Tennessee ESA Pilot Program

What “universal” does not mean

Following NCSL’s definition, universal means that a program currently provides universal student eligibility or will do so once fully implemented. It describes the statutory eligibility gate.

It does not say that appropriations are unlimited. It does not say that every applicant will be awarded funding. Utah’s universal program reported more than 8,800 students on a 2026–27 waitlist. Tennessee received 56,440 applications for 35,000 universal-program seats. Capped funding also appears in targeted programs: South Carolina closed applications after reaching its 15,000-student statutory limit.

Universal eligibility and limited annual funding can exist at the same time.

No. The federal scholarship tax credit under Internal Revenue Code Section 25F is not counted as one of the 21 directly funded state ESA programs or the three state tax-credit ESAs in this dataset. It is a separate federal tax-credit framework scheduled to begin January 1, 2027.

The IRS says individual taxpayers may be able to claim a federal credit of up to $1,700 for qualifying cash contributions to scholarship-granting organizations in participating states. As of July 24, 2026, 30 states had made an advance election to participate for 2027.

The federal program matters to future school-choice reporting because it will create a separate scholarship-funding stream, a separate participating-state list and a separate reporting system. It does not change the state ESA count on this page.

State ESA reporting is not standardized. Programs use different school years, status definitions, award formulas, publication schedules and legal terminology. We preserve those differences instead of converting them into falsely uniform statistics. The result is less tidy and faithful to what the states actually report.

Reporting-period mismatch.A state can publish a new 2026–27 award amount while its latest participation report still covers 2024–25 or 2025–26. Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia illustrate that problem in different ways. The table leaves both periods visible.

Definitional drift.“Student,” “recipient,” “scholarship,” “account,” “award,” “active participant” and “participating student” do not have one operational definition across the states. The metric label preserves the source’s status rather than assuming equivalence.

Provisional counts.Arizona says its 2026–27 figure will not stabilize until September. Texas expected additional funding batches after July 1. Those numbers are dated snapshots, not final year-end counts.

Missing data. Georgia and Wyoming are marked NR because we could not locate a current official program-wide participant count during this verification pass. NR means not located. It does not mean zero.

Indiana’s reporting period.The Indiana Treasurer’s page publishes 1,166 students without clearly identifying the period. We report the figure and the ambiguity rather than assigning a date the source does not supply.

Unverified award amount removed.The draft gave Tennessee’s ESA Pilot a precise estimated 2026–27 amount. The official fiscal record verified 4,817 enrolled students but did not support publishing that exact award as final, so the final page describes the award as formula-based and leaves the amount blank.

Official-source disagreement.Florida’s state and administrator figures cover different years. Missouri’s official report contains an internal caption error. Both issues are disclosed in the methodology instead of hidden.

Legal status can move.The Utah Attorney General reports that an April 2025 Third District Court ruling found the Utah Fits All Scholarship unconstitutional and that the Utah Supreme Court permitted an interlocutory appeal. The program issued 2026–27 awards while that appeal was pending. Wyoming’s Department of Education says its Supreme Court lifted an injunction and authorized distributions while the underlying lawsuit continues. Montana OPI’s last public stay notice authorized reimbursements only through June 30, 2026, while an appeal remained pending. These are dated procedural snapshots, not predictions about final outcomes.

What this dataset does not measure:

• Academic outcomes.
• Net fiscal impact on a state or district.
• A standardized public-school switcher rate.
• Comparable spending by expense category.
• Whether every legally eligible student could obtain funding.
• Parent or student satisfaction.

Those questions require separate datasets. Forcing them into this one would blur the answer this page can actually support.

The School Choice Index is an independent, non-partisan editorial reference for U.S. K–12 school-choice programs.

This dataset was assembled from national legislative inventories and official state program records. Every state figure was classified by metric type and reporting period and verified through July 31, 2026.

This reference exists to make state education savings account data easier to find, compare and verify. It does not rank providers, recommend schools, determine eligibility or provide legal, tax, financial or educational advice. Program rules and legal status can change after the snapshot date; families making an enrollment or account decision should confirm the current rule with the administering agency.

Read how The School Choice Index produces and updates its reference pages or submit a documented correction.