Texas TEFA Private School Enrollment Capacity Report 2026-27

Independent TEFA data audit · The School Choice Index, an independent comparison and research resource for U.S. school choice programs.

Published by The School Choice Index · Published: August 8, 2026 · Last updated: August 8, 2026 · Last verified: August 8, 2026 · Official roster snapshot: August 2, 2026 · State participant data current through July 29, 2026 · Analysis version 1.0

Independence disclosure: Schools do not pay for rankings, badges, verification, coverage, or placement. A separate part of this site may charge schools a flat monthly fee for parent-selected introductions; that payment never affects coverage, content, or result order. This /research/ page has no affiliate link or commercial call to action.

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Texas has not published a count of open private school seats for 2026-27. Not by school, not by grade, not statewide. So this Texas TEFA private school enrollment capacity report 2026-27 audits what the state does publish.

It is built on the official participating-school file, which holds 2,785 rows. After we removed repeated name-address-ZIP entries, 2,777 location records remain. Here is what surprised us: 1,597 of them — 57.5% — stop at prekindergarten or kindergarten. Only 1,179 serve any grade from 1 through 12. Only 662 serve any high school grade.

Texas had funded 85,344 accounts in the state's July 29 snapshot. The annual report does not split those funded accounts between private-school and homeschool/other settings. The participating-school file does not ask for or publish open desks.

That gap is real. The law requires long-range reporting on the program's effect on school capacity, but it does not require a live school-by-school seat inventory. The adopted rules did not add one. Once you see that, the whole "thousands of schools are participating" headline reads differently.

Research actions: Open the official TEFA school finder · Download the official participating-school workbook · Read the method

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What we actually verified

We think you should know exactly where the line is between what we checked and what we're relying on other people for.

We read these ourselves on August 8, 2026: the enacted text of Senate Bill 2 (89th Legislature, 2025); the Comptroller's adopted TEFA rules and public-comment response in the December 12, 2025 Texas Register; the official participating-school workbook, report run August 2, 2026, every row and every column; the August 1 annual demographic report; the Comptroller's June 30 funding announcement; the parent application guide; and the live TEFA school finder.

We computed these ourselves from the official file, and you can reproduce every one: the 2,777 normalized records, the grade-by-grade counts, the terminal-grade breakdown, the city and ZIP coverage, the submission timeline, the repeated-name groups, and the field audit.

We are relying on named outside reporting for these: the 70,000-to-75,000 open-seat estimate from the Texas Private School Association, reported by Houston Landing in February 2025; the San Antonio school-capacity account reported by Axios in March 2026; and the Allen Academy account reported by KBTX in August 2026. We label each one as a local or association estimate, not state data.

We did not verify, and nobody can verify from the public state data reviewed through August 8: whether any named school has an opening today, how many seats exist at any grade, admissions odds, school-level waitlists, or how many funded students are in private school rather than homeschool/other.

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What does the Texas TEFA private school enrollment capacity report 2026-27 actually show?

Texas can show how many provider records appear on the TEFA list. It cannot show how many seats those providers have. The official participating-school file contains 2,785 rows and zero fields for capacity, current enrollment, open seats, admissions status, or waitlists.

Four different numbers get called "capacity" in Texas coverage, and they measure four different things. Mixing them up is how almost every article on this topic goes wrong.

1. Fiscal capacity. How much money the Legislature allowed the program to spend in the first biennium. That's the $1 billion cap.

2. Program demand. How many student applications came in. About 274,000.

3. Provider coverage. How many provider and location rows appear in the state workbook. That's 2,785 raw rows.

4. Enrollment capacity. How many actual desks are open, by school and by grade.

Texas publishes the first three. It does not publish the fourth.

Here's why that matters in real life. A city might have 30 participating locations. Five of them might serve 10th grade. Those five might each have twenty openings — or none at all. The state's file cannot tell the difference. Neither can we.

The capacity evidence matrix

Sources: enacted SB 2, the August 1 annual demographic report, and the official August 2 participating-school workbook. Roster calculations are ours; see the method.

Here's the honest limit of this report, and we'd rather say it now than bury it: we cannot tell you whether a named school has room for your child today. The state cannot answer that from its public roster either. We found no statewide, school-by-grade open-seat count in the official sources reviewed through August 8, 2026. But that's not the end of the story, because a school-by-school seat count isn't the only thing that answers your question. If you're a parent trying to figure out whether the odds are with you, what actually changes your search is knowing which grades and which towns have almost no schools on the list at all — and that we can show you, record by record. If you need a live seat count for one specific school, skip to the eleven questions to ask a school's office and call them. That's the only reliable next step, and it takes about six minutes.

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Does Texas publish how many open seats private schools have?

No. Texas does not publish a live count of open TEFA private-school seats. State law does require a report on the program's effect on public and private school capacity and availability, but that is a long-range report, not a current school-by-grade seat list.

This is the part the two state reports make easy to mix up, and it's the actual answer to the question.

The law does ask for capacity analysis

Texas Education Code § 29.371 sets up an annual longitudinal report. Nine things go in it. Item four is the program's effect on public and private school capacity and availability.

So yes — capacity reporting is a real legal duty. It's in the law.

But the law does not set a first-report date or require live seat fields

Section 29.371(c) says the longitudinal report "must cover a period of not less than five years." It also has to include the data analyzed and the method used. Section 29.371(f) says the State Auditor must review and verify the report.

The five-year rule does not tell us when the first report must appear. The statute calls the report annual, requires at least five years of coverage, and gives no first-publication deadline. During rulemaking, OSOD and TASB asked for interim reports because they read the provision as leaving the public without this report until 2031. The Comptroller said it would comply with the statute, declined the added rules as outside the scope of that rulemaking, and did not announce a first-report date.

That creates a real timing question, but it does not create a live open-seat database.

The safe, useful answer is narrower: § 29.371 requires long-range capacity analysis. It does not require Texas to publish today's openings by school and grade.

The August report is a different report

The report dated August 1, 2026 is the annual demographic report under § 29.3715. It is due every August 1.

It lists ten specific things about participating children: grade, age, sex, race or ethnicity, the school district they live in, the campus they would otherwise attend, ZIP code, when they enrolled, their priority tier, and whether they have a disability.

Capacity isn't on that list. Neither are seats, private schools chosen, openings, or school waitlists. A text search of the full report returns no match for "capacity," "availability," "open seats," or "homeschool."

So if you opened the August report looking for seat counts and came up empty — you weren't missing a hidden table. That report has a different job.

The rulemaking record shows the state was asked for grade-level spots

During rulemaking, the Bush Institute suggested requiring schools to share admissions details and the number of available spots by grade. An individual commenter made a similar request.

The Comptroller's office declined those additions. Its stated reason was procedural: the additions were outside the scope of the proposed rules, were not a logical outgrowth of the proposal, and would materially change the issues without fair notice.

That matters because it tells us what happened without inventing a legal barrier. The state was asked for grade-level spot data. The adopted rules did not add it.

The admissions-autonomy clause does not answer the reporting question

Section 29.368 protects a provider's right to set its own admissions and enrollment practices, policies, and standards. That means an award does not force a private school to admit a child.

But the clause does not expressly bar Texas from collecting or publishing aggregate school-and-grade capacity totals. School autonomy is not a proven legal reason for the missing data.

The honest line is simpler: schools control admission. Texas has not created a public live-seat reporting system.

One comment in the adopted-rules record still lands hard. The Heritage Foundation — a supporter of school choice — said it was concerned that thousands of Texas participants would be unable to find a private school to attend.

That was November 2025. Before a single family applied.

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How many private schools actually accept TEFA money?

The official file has 2,785 rows. After removing repeated name-address-ZIP entries and keeping the most recent submission, 2,777 location records remain. That is not 2,777 unique K-12 private schools, and it is definitely not 2,777 schools with room.

The published participation number went up fast. Here's the trail from the state:

Sources: Texas Comptroller announcements dated December 22, 2025 and March 9, 2026; official workbook report run August 2, 2026.

The published topline grew about 4.6 times from December to August. Impressive growth, and real.

But it raises an obvious question. The federal Private School Universe Survey estimated 2,014 private schools in Texas in 2023-24, enrolling 290,728 students. So how does a TEFA file end up with 763 more records than the federal estimate of Texas private schools?

Because a "row" is not a "school"

Four reasons, and all four are verified.

Early-childhood names repeat across many locations. This is the big one, and we can prove it from two directions. In the state's own rulemaking record, the named commenter lists include 52 Primrose entries, 23 Goddard entries, and 15 Kiddie Academy entries. In the roster itself, 14 repeated-name early-childhood groups account for 388 records, 14.0% of the whole normalized file.

Here's the line that reframes the list: The Primrose name appears on 122 records. The entire city of Dallas holds 100.

Prekindergarten and kindergarten providers qualify through a different door. Section 29.358(b)(6) allows qualifying pre-K and kindergarten providers to join through the standards in § 29.171 instead of the private-school accreditation route. They're legitimately on the list. They just aren't all K-12 schools.

Multi-campus schools can appear once per campus. The Comptroller confirmed in the adopted rules that a school operating as one legal entity with several campuses may use any one qualifying campus to meet the two-year operating test. A legal school entity and a roster location are not always the same counting unit.

The federal number is a weighted estimate from a different system and year. NCES says its 2023-24 state figures are weighted estimates. The PSS universe, TEFA eligibility rules, roster timing, and campus treatment are not the same.

Do not use one number as a percentage of the other

You'll be tempted. Don't. The federal survey and the TEFA roster use different years, different definitions, and different collection systems. Dividing 2,777 by 2,014 produces a number that looks precise and means nothing.

One number worth holding onto, though: the federal survey estimated 1,714 Texas private schools and 257,559 students in 2021-22, then 2,014 schools and 290,728 students in 2023-24. That's an estimated 300 more schools and 33,169 more students in two years — before TEFA's first funded year. Texas private education was already growing. The program arrived on a rising line, not a flat one.

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How much of the TEFA school list is really preschool and daycare?

More than half. Of 2,777 normalized records, 955 serve prekindergarten only and 642 stop after kindergarten. That's 1,597 records, or 57.5%, that never reach first grade. Only 662 records — 23.8% — serve any high school grade.

This single table changes what the roster means.

Source: our analysis of the official August 2 participating-school workbook.

(The one invalid record is ABC Daycare in San Antonio, listed as starting at kindergarten and ending at prekindergarten. We flagged it rather than quietly fixing it.)

None of this is a mistake by the state. Texas deliberately opened TEFA to approved pre-K and kindergarten providers, and the adopted rules make clear that qualifying children enrolled with an approved § 29.171 provider are not automatically limited to the $2,000 homeschool/other amount. Those providers belong on the list.

It just means the headline number is mostly early childhood. And the repeated-name data proves it cleanly: of the 388 records in the 14 early-childhood name groups we tracked, 381 — that's 98.2% — stop at kindergarten or below. Exactly one serves a high school grade.

So when a story says "more than 2,700 schools are participating," the accurate translation for a parent of a fourth grader is closer to: 1,029 location records list your child's grade. For a parent of a junior, it's 642.

That is a completely different picture, and it comes from the state's own file.

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Which grades have the fewest TEFA schools?

Coverage drops twice — once after kindergarten, and again, hard, between eighth and ninth grade. The roster has 2,300 records serving prekindergarten, roughly 1,030 serving each elementary grade, 952 serving eighth grade, and 662 serving ninth.

Sources: funded-account counts from the August 1 demographic report; grade coverage from our analysis of the August 2 participating-school workbook.

Read this table carefully, and please don't do the division. The left column is every funded TEFA account in that grade, including homeschool/other. The right column is location records, and no record tells you how big it is. Funded accounts divided by records is not an occupancy rate, a capacity rate, or anything else. It's a meaningless number that looks like a real one.

The eighth-to-ninth grade cliff

Here's a finding we haven't seen anywhere, and it's the most useful thing in this section.

952 records serve eighth grade. 662 serve ninth. That's a net drop of 290 records, or 30.5%. Underneath that net change, 349 records list eighth grade as their highest grade, while 59 records begin at ninth grade.

Now compare it with the state's funded-account count. Funded accounts go from 5,369 in eighth grade to 4,805 in ninth. That's a 10.5% drop.

So at that one grade transition, roster coverage narrows about 2.9 times faster than the funded-account count does. That does not prove a seat shortage. It proves the list becomes much thinner at the exact point many families enter high school.

If your child is finishing eighth grade with a TEFA award in hand, that's the number to know. Not because there are no options — 662 location records is not nothing — but because the shape of your search is different from your neighbor's second grader, and the state's four-band grade filter won't show the exact drop.

After ninth grade, the roster is basically flat: 662, 649, 642, 640. Schools that list ninth grade usually keep listing grades through twelfth.

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Where are the TEFA schools — and where are the families?

Participating locations cluster in big cities, and funded families cluster in big regions, but those are two different maps and they don't line up. Houston has 328 roster records. Meanwhile 167 of the 382 city names in the file — 43.7% — have at least one participating location and not a single one that serves high school.

The top city names in the roster

Source: our analysis of the official August 2 participating-school workbook.

The five biggest city names hold 852 records — 30.7% of the entire list. The top 20 hold 1,405, or 50.6%. Half of Texas's participating locations sit in twenty city names.

(We grouped city names by fixing capitalization and extra spaces only. We did not merge "Ft. Worth" into "Fort Worth," because guessing at someone else's spelling is how clean data goes bad. Both variants appear in the file.)

The high school deserts

This is the finding that matters most for older kids, and we built it record by record:

• 167 of 382 city names (43.7%) have participating records but zero that serve any high school grade.
• 100 of 382 city names (26.2%) have zero records serving any grade from 1 through 12. Those towns are on the list, but only for preschool or kindergarten.
• 330 of the 759 ZIP codes (43.5%) with a participating record have no high school option in that ZIP at all.

If you live in one of those places, the statewide headline is not describing your situation.

Where funded families actually live

The state reports funded participants by the Regional Education Service Center tied to the family's parent-reported residence — not where the child's private school is.

Source: TEFA Annual Demographic Report, August 1, 2026. Regional figures are parent-reported residence data.

The top four regions hold 54,211 funded participants — 63.5% of the state. The top five hold 60,238, or 70.6%. The bottom five hold 3,279, or 3.8%. That's an 18.4-to-1 gap between the top five and the bottom five.

Do not divide this table by the city table. Cities aren't regions. Where a family lives isn't where their child goes to school. And these counts include homeschool/other families who need no private-school seat.

If you're rural, here's the straight version

A big statewide number does not mean there's a school near you that fits your child's grade, needs, budget, and drive time. The public roster can show listed locations. It cannot tell whether a grade-matched option is practical to reach or has room.

Two things are worth knowing. First, the official finder includes online schools, which are not limited by physical classroom desks in the same way. But online schools can still have grade ranges, staffing limits, admissions rules, and closed application windows. Second, distance and capacity are different questions. This report measures roster coverage, not drive time or openings.

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Does a TEFA award guarantee your child a seat?

No. The state's own parent guide says participation does not guarantee admission. An award and an enrollment are two separate things, decided by two different parties, and the school goes second.

Here's the sequence. Most coverage collapses it into one step, and that's where families get hurt.

1. The state finds your child eligible.
2. The program makes an award.
3. You opt in and choose an education setting.
4. If you choose private school, you apply to that school separately.
5. The school decides whether to admit and enroll your child.
6. The school confirms enrollment in the TEFA portal. Only then can a private-school account be funded.

Step six is where capacity actually bites. The August report says a parent must select a participating private school and the school must confirm enrollment before the account can be funded.

The first-year deadlines were real. Families awarded before June 22 had until July 15 to select a participating school, and that school had until July 31 to confirm enrollment. Families awarded from the waitlist later get four weeks from the award date to complete their confirmations.

A school that does not admit or enroll your child cannot confirm your enrollment. The public annual report does not give school-level reasons for awards that had not yet become funded accounts.

And it isn't a one-time check. Section 29.362(d) requires the program administrator, on or before October 1 and February 1, to verify that each participating child is not being counted for public-school funding and to notify the Comptroller if a private-school-funded child is not enrolled in a preapproved private school.

A school can still say no

Section 29.368 protects each school's right to set its own admissions and enrollment practices, policies, and standards. Space may be one reason a school says no. Other questions can include its own deadline, testing, interviews, records, conduct rules, mission fit, deposits, and whether the school believes it can serve the child.

That last one deserves a direct word for families with a child who has a disability. A larger TEFA award does not make a private school subject to special-education laws in the same way as a public school or charter school. It also does not prove the school has the services your child needs. Ask the school, in writing, exactly which services, staff, and accommodations it provides. Get specifics, not reassurance.

One in seven roster records was submitted after applications closed

Here's something the submission timestamps reveal.

403 of the 2,777 records — 14.5% — were submitted after March 31, 2026, the court-extended family application deadline. Among records serving high school, 128 of 662, or 19.3%, were submitted after that date.

Source: submitted-at timestamps in the official August 2 participating-school workbook. A timestamp is not an approval date.

Schools may apply on a rolling basis, so this is working as designed. But the practical effect is that a seventh of the August roster had not even been submitted when the family application window closed. A submission timestamp is not an approval date and does not prove when a school first appeared in the finder. It does prove the August list is not the same list families saw by March 31.

If you looked early and came up empty, check the official finder again. The list moved.

The eleven questions to ask a school's office

The state roster can't tell you if a school has room. The school's office can. Ask these, in this order, and write down the answers:

1. Are you accepting applications for my child's grade for 2026-27?
2. How many openings are left in that grade?
3. Is there a waitlist? How many families are on it?
4. What's your own application deadline — not the state's?
5. Do you require testing, an interview, references, or school records?
6. What's the full tuition and required fees for the year?
7. When is the deposit due, and is it refundable if my TEFA funding changes?
8. Which specific disability services and accommodations can you actually provide?
9. Is transportation available, and does it reach my address?
10. When will you confirm my child's enrollment in the TEFA portal?
11. What happens if that confirmation is not completed on time?

Question 10 is the one most families forget, and it is the school-side step that decides whether a private-school award can become a funded account.

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What do 85,344 funded accounts really tell us about capacity?

They tell us how many children had funded accounts in the state's July 29, 2026 snapshot. They do not tell us how many are in private school, which schools those are, or whether any seat was hard to find. The annual report does not publish a private-school versus homeschool/other split.

The first-year funnel, all from the state:

Source: TEFA Annual Demographic Report dated August 1, 2026; data current through July 29, 2026. The approximately 25,500 ineligible figure is also published on the official TEFA site.

The report says awards and account funding were still in progress. It calls these numbers a snapshot, not a final closeout, and says another update is planned before the 90th Legislature.

The missing setting split is why no capacity math works

For 2026-27, the standard private-school award is $10,474. A child with a qualifying disability and validated IEP can receive more, up to $30,000. A homeschool/other account is capped at $2,000. Certain qualifying pre-K and kindergarten students at approved providers can receive the higher funding level under the adopted rules.

The 85,344 figure blends the settings together. Without knowing how many funded children are enrolled in an approved private school or approved pre-K/K provider, you cannot calculate private-school seat demand from the annual report.

That single missing breakdown is the reason this report can describe roster coverage but not capacity. We'd rather say that plainly than publish a confident-looking estimate built on a guess.

At least 36,656 awards had not become funded accounts by July 29

More than 122,000 awards had been made. 85,344 accounts had been funded. The difference was greater than 36,656 on the report's snapshot date.

That is not a final failure count. The state said some parents had received awards but had not yet confirmed participation, and the award-and-funding process was still moving. Private-school families also needed school enrollment confirmation before funding.

The public report gives no reason-by-reason table for that gap. We cannot tell how much came from parents still deciding, parents declining, missed steps, private-school admission or confirmation, later verification, or another cause. Anyone assigning the whole gap to a seat shortage — or declaring that none of it involved seats — is guessing.

It's the single most interesting unanswered question in the program's first year.

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Three capacity numbers you'll see that are wrong

"90,000 available spots" is a budget figure, not a seat count. "2,785 schools" is a row count, not a school count. And the 76,613-student drop in Texas public schools was measured before TEFA paid out a single dollar.

1. "90,000 available spots" was never about classrooms

This number comes from arithmetic on the program's $1 billion first-biennium spending cap and the $10,474 standard private-school award. Depending on what costs and award levels someone assumes, the result lands around 90,000 to 100,000 accounts.

The statute uses similar language. Section 29.356(b) triggers the lottery when acceptable applications outnumber the "available positions in the program due to insufficient funding."

Read the last four words. The law is talking about money running out, not desks running out. When applications exceeded the program's funded capacity, the capacity that was exceeded was fiscal.

2. "2,785 participating schools" counts rows, not desks

Covered above, but worth repeating because it's the most common category error on this topic. The workbook contains 2,785 raw rows. After cleaning, 2,777 location records remain. Of those, 1,179 serve any grade from first through twelfth. A repeated early-childhood name can appear across dozens of locations.

3. TEFA did not cause the 2025-26 public-school decline

The Texas Education Agency reports that public-school enrollment fell by 76,613 students, or 1.4%, from 2024-25 to 2025-26.

Check the calendar. TEA defines the 2025-26 count using the last Friday in October 2025. TEFA's first account funding arrived July 1, 2026. A program that had not funded an account at the October snapshot cannot explain the decline measured there.

Whatever effect TEFA has on public-school enrollment will need to be tested against later data. Not this number.

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What capacity data is missing — and the one number that would unlock it

A real capacity report needs five things the state does not publish: total seats by grade, current enrollment, confirmed future enrollment, open seats, and school-level waitlists. But one setting count would answer the biggest first-year question right now.

The number to ask for

Ask for this:

How many of the 85,344 funded accounts were tied to an approved private school or approved pre-K/K provider as of July 29, 2026?

Once that count is known, the homeschool/other count is the remainder. It still would not reveal open seats, but it would finally separate funded students who need an approved school or provider from funded students who do not.

The July 1 payment total is also worth requesting, but it does not solve the split by itself.

On July 1, homeschool/other accounts received their full $2,000. Private-school accounts received 25% of each child's award. The Comptroller announced that nearly 73,000 accounts would receive the first funding batch.

The tempting equation is:

July 1 dollars = 25% of all private-school award amounts + $2,000 × homeschool/other accounts

But private-school award amounts are not all the same. The standard award is $10,474, while qualifying disability awards vary and can reach $30,000. "Nearly 73,000" is also not an exact account count. One dollar total therefore leaves more than one unknown.

To solve the split from payments, a requester would need the exact number of accounts in the batch and either the private-school setting count, the total annual value of private-school awards, or an award-level distribution. The cleanest public answer is still the funded-account count by setting.

Section 29.369(d) makes student records held by the Comptroller or program administrator confidential. That protects children. It does not mean this page can promise that any particular aggregate request must be released under Texas open-records law. The request should ask only for totals and no student-level data.

The minimum viable capacity dataset

If Texas — or any state — wanted to report real capacity, this is what it would take. One row per campus, per grade:

Notice what isn't in there: no student names, no individual records, nothing that needs to identify a child. School-and-grade totals with a verification date would answer almost the entire public question without publishing student-level data. That's our editorial recommendation, not a legal requirement.

During enrollment season, the useful refresh rate would be monthly, with a faster update when a school closes applications.

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How we built this report

We downloaded the official participating-school workbook, audited every field, removed repeated entries under a published rule, mapped every listed grade range, left contact information out of our analysis output, and compared the results with the state's demographic report, the enacted law, the adopted rules, and federal survey data. We never treat participation as evidence of an opening.

Primary sources

• Official TEFA participating-school workbook — report run August 2, 2026
• TEFA Annual Demographic Report, 2026-27 — dated August 1, 2026; data current through July 29, 2026
• TEFA Parent Application Guide — 2026-27
• December 22, 2025 participation announcement — about 600 private schools and pre-K providers after 10 days
• March 9, 2026 participation announcement — more than 2,200 schools signed up
• March 31 application-deadline extension — extension made to comply with a federal court order
• Senate Bill 2, enrolled text — 89th Legislature, 2025
• Adopted TEFA rules and public-comment response — Texas Register, December 12, 2025
• June 30, 2026 account-funding announcement
• Official TEFA school finder
• NCES 2023-24 Private School Universe Survey report
• NCES 2021-22 Texas private-school table
• Texas Education Agency 2025-26 public-school enrollment report

Named news reports appear only in the "Voices on the record" section and are labeled as local or association accounts.

How we cleaned the workbook

Deduplication. We normalized school name, street address, and five-digit ZIP for case, punctuation, and repeated spaces. Where the same normalized name-address-ZIP key appeared more than once, we kept the row with the latest submission timestamp. That removed 8 rows, leaving 2,777.

Grade mapping. We mapped prekindergarten below kindergarten, kindergarten as 0, and grades 1 through 12 by number. A record "serves" a grade when its listed minimum is at or below that grade and its listed maximum is at or above it. One record with a reversed range was flagged and excluded from grade counts rather than silently corrected.

City grouping. We fixed capitalization and repeated spaces only. We did not merge spelling variants or turn city names into metro areas.

Repeated-name groups. We counted 14 clearly repeated early-childhood name patterns in the normalized school-name field. That is a roster-name analysis, not a claim that every location shares one owner, franchise agreement, or legal entity.

Privacy. The workbook includes a primary contact's first name, last name, title, and phone number. We did not use those fields in the analysis reported here, and we do not reproduce them on this page.

What's incomplete in the source itself

Worth knowing before you use the workbook:

• 385 records (13.9%) list no website.
• 1,470 records (52.9%) leave the special-needs assessment field blank.
• Only 123 records (4.4%) name a specific special-needs assessment rather than leaving the field blank or using a general response such as "None" or "Other."
• 687 records (24.7%) leave the language-services field blank.
• There is no permanent public campus ID, which is exactly why unique legal schools cannot be counted reliably from the file.

Limits we want on the record

No seat fields exist. No admissions-status field exists. We did not call every school. Providers can apply on a rolling basis, so the file changes. Grade labels are provider-submitted. Submission time is not approval time. The federal survey and the TEFA roster are not directly comparable. City strings contain spelling variation we chose not to guess at. And no roster field proves that a school has an opening today.

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What this evidence supports — and what it doesn't

We can say what the state's list contains, how it is distributed by grade and place, and what fields are missing. We cannot say whether Texas has enough seats, whether it has too few, or whether any particular child will get in.

What the evidence supports

• The official workbook holds 2,785 raw rows; normalization leaves 2,777 location records.
• 57.5% of those records end at prekindergarten or kindergarten.
• 1,179 serve at least one grade from first through twelfth; 662 serve high school.
• Roster coverage narrows about 2.9 times faster than the funded-account count between eighth and ninth grade.
• 43.7% of city names in the file have no high-school-serving record.
• 14.5% of records in the August snapshot were submitted after the March 31 family application deadline.
• The file has no capacity, current-enrollment, vacancy, admissions-status, or waitlist field.
• A TEFA award and a private-school admission are separate decisions.
• 85,344 accounts were funded in the state's July 29 snapshot.
• State law requires long-range analysis of the program's effect on public and private school capacity and availability.
• The August 1 demographic report does not contain live capacity or open-seat data.

What it does not support

• That Texas has enough private-school seats.
• That Texas lacks enough private-school seats.
• That all 85,344 funded children enrolled in private school.
• That each roster row is a separate K-12 school.
• That any named school has an opening.
• That funded accounts per roster record measures occupancy, demand per school, or capacity.
• That the August demographic report broke the law by omitting capacity; it is a different report under a different section.
• That the first § 29.371 longitudinal report must appear in any specific year.
• That school autonomy makes aggregate capacity reporting legally impossible.

The bottom line

Texas has published enough to measure who appears on the provider roster. It has not published enough to measure whether there is room. Those are different questions, and until the state or schools publish grade-level seat data, the honest statewide answer to the second one is: the public data cannot tell us.

Research actions: Open the official TEFA school finder · Download the official participating-school workbook · Read the method · Review the eleven school-office questions

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Voices on the record

Four people said the quiet part out loud, at four different moments, and we think they belong here.

Before the program launched, the Heritage Foundation — a supporter of school choice — told the Comptroller it was concerned that thousands of Texas participants would be unable to find a private school to attend. That appears in the adopted-rules record from November 2025.

In February 2025, Laura Colangelo, executive director of the Texas Private School Association, estimated 70,000 to 75,000 open seats in accredited Texas private schools and called the fit question "a bit of a guessing game" in Houston Landing. It is an association estimate from before SB 2 became law, not a state count, and it does not break seats out by grade or place.

In March 2026, Liliana Gutierrez of the Archdiocese of San Antonio told Axios that "we're not going to be able to accept everybody with a voucher." Axios reported that all 35 archdiocesan campuses were participating, that they served about 9,000 students, and that some grades were reaching capacity earlier than usual. Enrollment decisions stayed campus by campus, based on classroom space and staffing.

In August 2026, Jennifer Angle of Allen Academy in Bryan told KBTX the school had 57 TEFA students, including 24 new families. Twelve of those new families said they could not have attended without TEFA.

Those accounts do not add up to a statewide capacity estimate, and we're not presenting them as one. They are an advocacy-group warning, an association estimate, and two local school accounts. Together, they show why capacity can look completely different by grade, campus, and family.

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Frequently asked questions

How many private schools participate in Texas TEFA?

The official workbook has 2,785 raw rows. After removing repeated normalized name-address-ZIP entries, 2,777 location records remain. That is not 2,777 unique K-12 private schools. The file includes approved pre-K and kindergarten providers, separate campuses, and repeated early-childhood names across many locations.

How many open TEFA private-school seats are available in Texas?

Texas has not published a statewide open-seat count by school and grade. The participating-school workbook contains no field for capacity, current enrollment, open seats, admissions status, or waitlists. The only statewide estimate we found was 70,000 to 75,000 open seats across accredited Texas private schools, attributed to the Texas Private School Association in February 2025. It predates the first TEFA year and has no grade-level breakdown.

Does a TEFA award guarantee my child a seat?

No. The state's parent guide says TEFA participation does not guarantee admission. You apply to the school separately, the school decides, and the school must confirm enrollment in the TEFA portal before a private-school account can be funded.

How many TEFA roster records serve high school?

662 of 2,777, or 23.8%. Coverage by exact grade is 662 for ninth, 649 for tenth, 642 for eleventh, and 640 for twelfth.

Why are so many TEFA records preschool or kindergarten?

Texas deliberately allows approved pre-K and kindergarten providers into the program. Of 2,777 normalized records, 955 are prekindergarten only and 642 stop at kindergarten — 57.5% combined.

What if the school I want is full?

Ask whether there are openings in your child's exact grade, whether there is a waitlist, and when the school will confirm enrollment in the portal. Then check the official finder again. In the August roster, 403 records had submission timestamps after the March 31 family application deadline, so the list has changed since the application window.

Can the official school finder filter one exact grade?

Not directly. The finder uses four grade bands: Pre-K, elementary K–5, middle 6–8, and high 9–12. A "high school" result does not by itself tell a tenth-grade parent whether that record lists tenth grade. The official workbook's minimum- and maximum-grade fields can.

Are the annual report's district and campus tables the private schools TEFA students chose?

No. The annual report labels the district and campus information as parent-reported. It describes the family's district of residence and the campus tied to the application, not a public list of private schools chosen by funded students.

How often does the participating-school list change?

Schools can apply on a rolling basis. The state reported about 600 private schools and pre-K providers after the first 10 days of school registration in December 2025, more than 2,200 schools by March 9, 2026, and 2,785 raw workbook rows in the August 2 snapshot. Our next scheduled roster audit is September 2026.

Why doesn't this report estimate total seats?

Because the workbook does not disclose school size, current enrollment, operational capacity, open seats, or waitlists. Multiplying records by an assumed school size would produce a precise-looking number with nothing behind it. We'd rather publish the gap than fill it with a guess.

When will Texas publish real capacity data?

State law requires an annual longitudinal report that includes the program's effect on public and private school capacity and availability and covers at least five years. The statute gives no first-publication date, and it does not promise a live school-by-grade seat list. As of August 8, 2026, Texas had not announced when the first § 29.371 report would appear.

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Data, version history, and citation

Analysis: Texas TEFA Capacity Evidence Matrix and Participating-Provider Coverage Analysis, 2026-27 — Version 1.0

Source roster: Official TEFA participating-school workbook, report run August 2, 2026

Participant snapshot: TEFA Annual Demographic Report dated August 1, 2026; data current through July 29, 2026

License: You may cite or reuse the original calculations on this page with attribution. The state source files remain subject to their own terms.

Next scheduled roster audit: September 2026

Version history

• v1.0 — August 8, 2026: First publication. Roster snapshot August 2, 2026. Participant data current through July 29, 2026.

Suggested citation

The School Choice Index. (2026). Texas TEFA Private School Enrollment Capacity Report 2026-27 (Version 1.0). https://theschoolchoiceindex.com/research/texas-tefa-private-school-enrollment-capacity-report/

Found an error, or has a figure changed? Use the site's contact page and include the claim, source, and date. Corrections should be logged in this version history.

Related research: School choice statistics · Texas TEFA testing and accountability requirements