School Voucher Payments by Private School: Official State Data, 2024–26

There is no defensible national answer from the reviewed disclosures. Within West Virginia’s complete 2024–25 actual-payment report, Cross Lanes Christian School received the largest amount at $1,004,246.09. Within Arkansas’s spring-only table, Little Rock Christian Academy led at $2,137,156. Those figures cannot be compared as full-year school payments.

The temptation is obvious: two tables, both with school names and dollar signs, sort descending, publish one list. It would be wrong for four separate reasons.

The periods do not match.Arkansas’s $2.14 million is from spring transactions only. West Virginia’s $1.00 million covers the full 2024–25 year. The Arkansas report does not supply a school-level fall amount that can be added to its spring table.

The transaction stages do not match. Maryland reports awards offered and accepted. Indiana reports qualified award amounts students were eligible to receive. Neither figure is interchangeable with a source that labels the amount paid to a school.

The program designs do not match. Some programs pay schools directly. Some fund a parent account that the parent directs through a platform. Others route a warrant or check through the school. The same-looking dollar column can sit at a different point in the payment process.

The reporting units do not match. One row may identify a campus, another a legal entity, another a provider organization. Similar names do not establish that two records refer to the same institution.

So this page does not publish one national comparison. It publishes state-level figures with the source, amount type and period attached to every number.

On July 31, 2026, the Florida Department of Education’s public Florida Tax Credit Scholarship quarterly-reports page linked no report newer than June 2023. Its School Choice “Facts & Figures” page linked FTC fast facts dated October 2022 and Opportunity Scholarship figures dated September 2022, while the same page linked Home Education statistics dated September 2025, a 2024–25 Home Education annual report, Virtual Education statistics dated October 2025, and FES research through 2023–24. Version 1.0 records the date of the underlying program file rather than treating every item on the page as current to the same period.

That finding is deliberately narrow. It describes the public FDOE pages checked on one date. It does not claim that Florida has no school-level record anywhere.

Arkansas’s report lists all 126 participating private schools with EFA enrollment, total enrollment and the EFA share of each school. We transcribed that table and recomputed the distribution: 59 of the 126 schools had EFA students making up at least half of enrollment, and 7 had at least 90%.The transcription reconciles to the report’s totals of 126 schools and 10,834 EFA students attending private schools.

That creates a complementary disclosure gap. West Virginia provides complete school-level dollars but not school-level student counts. Arkansas publishes school-level student counts but identifies providers for spring transactions only. Neither report gives both measures for the same full year.

West Virginia set the full 2024–25 annual award at $4,921.39. We compared every nonpublic-school payment with the nearest whole-number multiple of that award.

• 13 of 161 rows fall within one cent of an exact whole-award multiple.
• 49 rows fall within one-tenth of an annual award of the nearest whole multiple.
• Sikora Montessori School received exactly $4,921.39, one full award.
• Shepherdstown Montessori received exactly $9,842.78, two full awards.
• Bishop Walsh School received exactly $39,371.12, eight full awards.

Across all 161 rows, the $31,921,518.22 in nonpublic-school payments equals 6,486.28 full-award equivalents. West Virginia reported 7,231 students whose declared educational pathway was a nonpublic school, producing an award-equivalent-to-student ratio of about 0.90.

That is a unit conversion, not a student count. The report supports at least two mechanisms that can create the gap: awards were prorated to 75%, 50% or 25% for later application windows, and families could spend account funds on approved expenses other than private-school tuition. The published school table does not allow those effects to be separated.

Start with the administering agency’s data or reports page, then check the state’s fiscal-transparency sources, and then use a public-records request if no qualifying school-level file is published. In West Virginia, Arkansas, Maryland, Indiana and Wisconsin, the answer or a related school-level figure appears in an official file.

The seven-step protocol used for this audit can be rerun:

1. Identify the administering agency. West Virginia’s program is run by the State Treasurer’s Office. Oklahoma’s is run by the Tax Commission. North Carolina’s is run by the State Education Assistance Authority. The education department is not always the agency holding the payment record.
2. Open the program’s “Data,” “Reports,” “Facts & Figures” or “Statistics” page.
3. Record every posted file and its date, and note the newest file rather than relying on the page’s own modified date. Florida shows why: different files on the same page can cover very different years.
4. Open the newest source and identify its finest unit of analysis: program, district, county, receiving school, provider or student.
5. Check whether any column expresses dollars attributable to a named receiving private school. Many reports name schools without amounts, or publish amounts without school names.
6. Check the state’s fiscal-transparency or payment portal separately. A scholarship warrant or payment may appear there even when the program page publishes only summary statistics.
7. Record the exact source, reporting period and date checked. A school amount without all three is easy to misquote later.

Where the public file does not exist, the next route is a request for records aggregated by receiving school for a defined date range. Name the unit of analysis. A loosely worded request may produce a student-level export with the school field suppressed, which does not answer the question.

Two compliance thresholds also reveal where school-specific receipt figures may exist even when no public table was located:

• Florida: a participating private school receiving more than $250,000 in scholarship funds must submit an independent CPA agreed-upon-procedures report by September 15 to the scholarship funding organization that awarded the majority of its scholarship funds.
• North Carolina: a nonpublic school enrolling 70 or more students using K–12 Program scholarship funds for at least one semester must obtain an annual CPA financial review. The financial statement must indicate the amount received from the State Education Assistance Authority by program and must be submitted within 120 days of the end of the school’s fiscal year.

Requirements are program-specific, and the record often goes to the state or funding organization rather than directly to the public. Florida requires an agreed-upon-procedures report above a scholarship-receipt threshold. North Carolina requires qualifying schools’ financial statements to identify the amount received by program. Neither reviewed public page supplied a complete school-by-school payment table.

The verified requirements in this first release are:

• Florida: a school above the $250,000 scholarship-fund threshold must submit the independent CPA agreed-upon-procedures report described above.
• North Carolina: a school meeting the 70-student threshold must obtain an annual CPA financial review, and the financial statements must identify the amount received from the state’s K–12 Programs by program.
• Arkansas: the annual EFA report publishes each participating private school’s EFA enrollment, total enrollment and EFA share of enrollment.
• West Virginia: a participating nonpublic school submits the list of Hope students attending the school to the county board of education as part of the annual academic-progress process.

The Florida threshold and North Carolina requirement show that program-specific school receipt figures can be part of compliance processes, even when a public consolidated table was not located.

Private school choice programs and their reporting systems are changing on different schedules. A dated disclosure index lets a reader distinguish an actual payment from an award, a spring-only table, a projection, an application count or a participating-school list.

Three things are moving at once.

Programs are getting much larger.Arkansas’s official EFA report puts program spending at $37.3 million in its first year and $93.8 million in its second, with 2025–26 costs projected at roughly $277 million. West Virginia’s Hope participation grew from 2,333 students in 2022–23 to 10,530 in 2024–25, and the Treasurer’s office said it was preparing to serve up to 42,000 expected studentswhen eligibility fully expands in 2026–27.

Participation is not payment. Texas announced that nearly 73,000 Education Freedom Accounts would receive initial funding on July 1, 2026. Private-school students receive 25% of their award on July 1, another 25% on October 1 and the remaining 50% on February 1, 2027 if they remain enrolled in a participating school. That establishes that the first funding cycle is underway; it does not create a completed annual school-by-school payment report.

A federal layer begins in 2027. The Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, codified at 26 U.S.C. §25F, begins January 1, 2027. Individual taxpayers may claim a federal credit of up to $1,700 for qualifying cash contributions to scholarship granting organizations. As of July 24, 2026, 30 states had made an advance election to participate for 2027. School-level scholarship disbursement visibility will depend on what participating states and organizations are required or choose to publish.

We reviewed official agency reports, appendices, data pages and dashboards; preserved each source’s own terminology; assigned an amount type before performing a calculation; and did not combine figures with different definitions or periods. Where this page publishes an original statistic, it identifies the complete official table used and the arithmetic performed.

Scope and sources of record

Version 1.0 audits the public reporting systems of 11 states. For every school-level figure, the source of record is the administering agency or the official report it commissioned:

• West Virginia State Treasurer’s Office / Hope Scholarship Board — Hope Scholarship Annual Report, 2024–2025 Academic Year
• Arkansas Dept. of Education with University of Arkansas Dept. of Education Reform — 2024–25 Arkansas Education Freedom Accounts Program Annual Report
• Maryland State Dept. of Education — Joint Chairman’s Report for BOOST Scholarship Program, FY 2026
• Indiana Dept. of Education — 2024–2025 Annual Choice Report
• Wisconsin Dept. of Public Instruction — Private School Choice Programs: Data and Reports
• North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority — Opportunity Scholarship and ESA+ summary data
• Arizona Dept. of Education — ESA Fiscal Year 2026 Quarter 3 Report
• Ohio Dept. of Education and Workforce — nonpublic-school funding page; Ohio Administrative Code 3301-11-10
• Oklahoma Tax Commission — Parental Choice Tax Credit procedures and current reports
• Florida Dept. of Education — School Choice Facts & Figures, FTC quarterly reports and private-school compliance information
• Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts — Education Freedom Account funding announcements

No secondary source supplies a headline amount or original calculation in version 1.0.

What we calculated ourselves

Every derived statistic comes from a complete, internally consistent official table and is identified where it appears. The original calculations are:

• West Virginia school-row count, mean, median, minimum, top-10 and top-25 totals and shares, bottom-80 total and share, in-state and out-of-state shares, named-recipient coverage, award-multiple counts and award-equivalent conversion
• Arkansas top-10 school total, named-provider coverage percentage, and counts of schools at or above the 50% and 90% EFA-enrollment thresholds
• The 47.9-percentage-point difference between West Virginia and Arkansas named-recipient coverage

Full source precision was retained through each calculation and rounding was applied only for display.

How we validated the transcriptions

For West Virginia, all 161 nonpublic-school rows were transcribed. The sum matches the state’s reported $31,921,518.22exactly, and the reconstructed state subtotals match the report’s state table across all 11 states.

For Arkansas, all 126 participating-private-school enrollment rows were transcribed. The count reconciles to the report’s 126 schools, and the EFA-student sum reconciles to the report’s 10,834 private-school students. A transcription that reconciles to independent totals printed by the source is one we are willing to compute on.

How school names are handled

The field school_name_as_reportedpreserves the source’s wording. Similarly named schools are not merged without independent evidence that they are the same legal or reporting entity. Two rows with the same school name in different cities remain separate rows.

What “not located” means

not_located_in_reviewed_public_files means no qualifying named-school amount was found in the specified public sources by July 31, 2026, using the seven-step protocol above. It does not mean no record exists. A record may sit in another official system, a legislative or audit file, a compliance submission or a response to a public-records request.

Corrections and independence

Material corrections are recorded with the date, affected records, previous value or classification, revised value or classification, reason and source. The visible “Last verified” date changes only when the underlying records or methodology have actually been rechecked.

No school, program, provider or organization can pay to be included in, excluded from or described differently in this research dataset.

This is a scoped first release built from what the audited states publish, not a complete accounting of U.S. private school choice spending. It supports documented school-level figures, same-source calculations and disclosure comparisons. It does not support a national total, a national school comparison, conclusions about a school’s finances or claims about student outcomes.

Coverage is incomplete. Version 1.0 audits 11 states. States outside the table have not been assessed for this release. Their absence says nothing about what they publish.

Amounts are not school revenue.A reported payment is not tuition, total revenue, profit or the share of a school’s budget that comes from public funds. West Virginia’s appendix establishes that a school received a specified program amount; it does not describe the school’s complete finances.

Payment timing can remain ambiguous. A report may reflect authorization, obligation, disbursement, reconciliation or a combination. West Virginia reports that $1,856,183.06was returned by the program manager after the school year closed and therefore is not reflected in the 2024–25 financial summary. Even a clean annual total has defined accounting edges.

North Carolina and Wisconsin are not row-level imports in version 1.0. Wisconsin publishes official per-school workbooks. North Carolina publishes program summary-data pages, and its ESA+ page links a dated June 1, 2026 summary file. This release does not publish a period-locked North Carolina school-payment export or a reconciled Wisconsin workbook import. They are classified, not used in school comparisons.

School names are reporting labels, not affiliation findings. We do not classify schools by religious affiliation from names alone. A keyword scan would be easy to produce and easy to misquote; an affiliation statistic requires a separate source, a stated classification method and manual review.

The headline figures do not sum. They cover different periods and transaction stages. This bears repeating because it is the exact error the amount-type system is designed to prevent.