Texas ESA Program: Tiers, Amounts, and the 2027-28 Window

The date that matters most to a Texas family holding a late award is September 15, 2026, and the program has put a number on missing it. Its August 28 update says parents in that award cycle "will have to complete these steps by September 15 to receive their full award amount for the 2026-27 school year. If steps are not completed until after Sept 15, they will receive 75% of their award amount." The steps are the two the parent controls: have a participating private school confirm enrollment in Odyssey, or opt in as homeschool/other. Nearly 4,500 Tier 3 children were notified that week, behind nearly 15,000 notified on August 11, and every award carried four weeks.

That is the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program in its first September: 274,000-plus applications, over 118,000 active awards, and a waitlist that opened at 152,702 children and is still being worked down. What follows is the rulebook behind those numbers, for the parent holding an award and trying not to lose it, and for the one who missed out and wants to walk into the 2027-28 window with the right paper.

Program year: 2026-27, with what is already published about 2027-28. Read on September 12, 2026 from Senate Bill 2 as enrolled, the comptroller's adopted rules, the Parent Application Guide dated February 12, 2026, the program's own news updates, and Odyssey's help center. I hold no license and have no standing with the comptroller's office or Odyssey; where I say "the guide says," open the guide.

Three numbers the statute fixes, and one the comptroller fills in each year

The program is Subchapter J of Chapter 29 of the Texas Education Code, added by Senate Bill 2 of the 89th Legislature in 2025, and it names the money in Sec. 29.361.

The base amount for a child attending a participating private school is not a dollar figure in the statute. It is a formula: 85 percent of the estimated statewide average amount of state and local funding per student in average daily attendance. The Texas Education Agency ran that formula for 2026-27 and the program published the result: $10,474. Expect a different number for 2027-28 because the inputs move every year.

Two amounts are hard-coded. A child with a disability is funded at the base amount plus what the child's school district received (or would have received) in state special education funding for that child in the preceding year, capped at $30,000 in total. A child in the homeschool/other setting is limited to $2,000 for a school year. Neither of those figures is indexed, so they will read the same in 2027-28 unless the Legislature amends them.

And the fourth number is the ceiling on the whole program. The enrolled bill states that for the state fiscal biennium beginning September 1, 2025, spending on the program may not exceed $1 billion. That single sentence is why a lottery happened. It is also why nobody can tell you today how many accounts 2027-28 will fund: that school year begins inside the next biennium, and the 90th Legislature, which convenes January 12, 2027, has not written its appropriation yet.

Eligible is the easy part. The tier is what decided anything.

Sec. 29.355 sets eligibility, and it is short. The child must be a U.S. citizen or national or lawfully present, must be eligible to attend a Texas public school or open-enrollment charter (or a state pre-K program, which has its own entry rules), and must reside in Texas with at least one parent who is a Texas resident. The Parent Application Guide adds that a military family can satisfy residency by uploading orders that require them to be in Texas for the school year, even if they are stationed elsewhere at application time.

The program's homepage reports that about 25,500 of the year-one applications were found ineligible, under ten percent of 274,000. Eligibility did not do the sorting. Priority did.

For 2026-27, Sec. 29.356 and the guide lay the tiers out in this order:

The dollar lines come from the 2026 HHS poverty guidelines, published January 15, 2026, and the guide prints them: for a family of four, the poverty level is $33,000, so 200 percent is $66,000 and 500 percent is $165,000. Each additional household member adds $5,680 to the base line. The comptroller's adopted rules at 34 TAC 16.401 through 16.410 (Texas Register, December 12, 2025) define the income being tested as adjusted gross income, not total income, after the agency changed the definition between the proposed and final text. The guide ties it to one document: the IRS Form 1040 filed for tax year 2024 or 2025 on which the child is claimed as a dependent, with household size matching that return.

Two things about the disability route are easy to miss.

First, the disability priority and the disability funding are proven with different paper. For a place in Tier 1, the guide accepts a current or expired Texas IEP, an out-of-state IEP verified by the issuing state or district, a Full Individual and Initial Evaluation that documents a qualifying disability, or the comptroller's own TEFA Disability Certification Form signed by one or more qualified professionals. Any of those gets you the tier. None of them, on its own, gets you a dollar above $10,474.

Second, siblings ride with the highest-priority child in the household. The guide says that if one child is selected, all eligible siblings on the same application are accepted with them "even if they are prioritized differently." That is why the first award round included 16,520 siblings alongside 28,233 Tier 1 children, and why a single application per household is not just a convenience but the mechanism that makes the sibling rule work.

How 274,000 applications became 118,000 accounts

The window opened at 9 a.m. Central on February 4, 2026, and the guide printed a close of 11:59 p.m. on March 17. On March 17 the comptroller announced the deadline was extended through March 31 to comply with a federal court order; at that point more than 229,000 students had applied and 2,200 schools had registered. The last two weeks added roughly 45,000 more.

Then the sort. The comptroller's April 2 overview put about 30,000 applicants in Tier 1 and about 79,000 in Tier 2, and said plainly that year-one funding was expected to run out inside Tier 2. It did. The program's lottery update, revised May 7, gives the counts:

• Tier 1: 28,233 children plus 16,520 siblings, all awarded and notified the week of April 20. Roughly $415 million covered the whole tier.
• Tier 2: a random-number lottery the week of April 27 fixed an order; 51,181 were awarded and 20,383 went to the waitlist in that order.
• Tier 3: 65,368 waitlisted.
• Tier 4: 66,951 waitlisted.

The May 4 release describes the lottery as run by Odyssey with a process tested by the comptroller's data staff and observed by the State Auditor's Office and advisers from Ernst & Young, and gives every awarded family 30 days from notification to appeal the funding amount, the tier, or an ineligibility finding. Money was held back for appeals.

Awards kept moving after that, because every family that opted out released a slot, and so did every family that dropped from private school to the $2,000 setting. On June 23 the program awarded 5,499 more Tier 2 children out of exactly that money. The largest single step was August 11, when it issued nearly 15,000 awards to Tier 3 children, pushing active awards past 118,000; nearly 4,500 more Tier 3 awards followed the week of August 28. That update puts the running total at "almost 50,000 students" awarded since the waitlist was created, and says everyone still waiting has moved up by that many spots. Tier 4, as far as anything published shows, has not been reached.

A waitlist position is not a queue number a parent can improve. The May 4 release describes the lottery as having "established the order in which eligible students receive awards or move from the waitlist as funding becomes available," with siblings grouped under the household's highest-priority applicant. That order was fixed in April. Nothing a family does now moves it, and nothing in it promises an award.

The setting you picked locked on the last day of the window

Here is the rule that cost some families the larger amount, and it is printed in the guide in plain language. The application asks for the child's educational setting for 2026-27. Selecting "private school" sets the potential award at $10,474 (or up to $30,000 with a qualifying IEP). Selecting "homeschool/other" sets it at $2,000. That selection locks at the end of the application period. Afterward a family can move down from private school to homeschool/other and take the $2,000, but cannot move up.

The guide's reason is administrative: a locked setting tells the program what each account can cost and therefore how many it can fund. The consequence for a parent is that the private-school box had to be checked by March 31 even if no school had said yes yet. You did not have to name a school on the application; you had to declare the intent. School selection and enrollment confirmation came later, on summer deadlines: parents choosing by June 1 and schools confirming by June 15 for money on July 1, with a final parent deadline of July 15 and school deadline of July 31 for the August round.

"Participating" is doing work in that sentence. Under the adopted rule at 16.404, a private school can be approved if it is accredited by an organization recognized by the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission or by TEA, gives a nationally norm-referenced assessment (or the state instrument) to participating students in grades 3 through 12, and has continuously operated a campus for at least two school years; the comptroller clarified in adoption that the campus need not have been in Texas. The school finder lists who has registered, on a rolling basis. Registration is the school's decision. An accredited school that never applies is not a participating school, and a child assigned to it collects nothing.

The homeschool/other setting is broader than its label. The guide says to choose it if the child "will not be attending a participating accredited private school but will participate in a nonpublic education setting, including homeschooling." An unaccredited microschool, a school that chose not to register, a hybrid program: all of those land in the $2,000 bucket. If you are in a co-op or umbrella arrangement and wondering what that setting means for your compliance file, the umbrella school post covers it from the other direction.

The IEP has to be in TEA's system, not in your filing cabinet

The disability funding above the base is not calculated from anything a parent uploads. TEA's letter to administrators on SB 2 explains that districts load an "EFA IEP" (the service schedule, instructional setting and funding-level codes, without the goals and achievement levels of a full IDEA IEP) into a TEA portal, and TEA passes the funding data to the comptroller. The guide's deadline was firm: a Texas IEP from 2023-24, 2024-25 or 2025-26 had to be on file with TEA by the close of the window for the child to be considered for anything above $10,474.

That is why the application asked for the child's Texas Unique Student Identification number and the instructional code from the IEP, and why the guide told parents of children who have only ever attended private school that their local public district would need to load the IEP and generate the UID. It also offered an escape hatch that is easy to misread as a solution: if every method of obtaining a UID has been exhausted, a parent may enter "11111" followed by the ZIP code. That keeps the application moving. It does not produce additional funding. The guide says so in the same paragraph.

A family that wants the disability amount for 2027-28 and does not yet have a Texas IEP is looking at an evaluation, and the evaluation clock is district-side. TEA's letter cites the IDEA timelines: 15 school days to respond to a written request, 45 school days to complete the evaluation, and an ARD committee meeting within 30 calendar days after that. Either the district of residence or the district where the private school sits must honor the request. Counting backward from a window that opens in the first weeks of 2027, a request made in the fall of 2026 is not early.

The money goes to the school, never to you

Nothing about a Texas account works like a reimbursement program. The provider invoices through the Odyssey platform, the parent approves, and the comptroller pays the provider. There is no cash withdrawal and no reimbursement of an out-of-pocket purchase. The program's tuition and fee guidance to private schools, dated May 28, 2026, adds the corollary: schools and vendors may not refund, rebate or credit a TEFA-paid transaction back to a parent's or student's personal account. Spend your own money on something and it is your purchase, permanently.

The same guidance draws the fee line. A school may not charge a TEFA student different tuition or fees because of the award. Enrollment fees, books, technology, uniforms, meals, mandatory facility fees, graduation fees, transportation and assessments can be billed to the account; before- and after-school care, capital campaigns, fundraising and parent-organization memberships cannot. Families may pay 2027-28 tuition in advance from 2026-27 funds, and if the child then exits the program, the advance payment goes back to the state. The general question of which expense categories survive review is its own post; the point here is that Texas asks it before the money moves, not after.

Disbursement follows the setting. As read on the program site on September 12, private-school accounts receive 25 percent on July 1, 25 percent on October 1 and the final 50 percent on February 1, 2027; homeschool/other accounts receive the full $2,000 at once. (The February guide phrased the later installments as "no later than Oct. 1 and April 1, 2027," so the site's current schedule is the one to rely on.) A child who exits mid-year triggers the closure rule in Sec. 29.362(f), which sends the remaining balance back to the comptroller. The mechanics of leaving, and of the October 1 and February 1 attendance checks that catch a child who quietly re-enrolled in a district, are in the post on leaving public school for an ESA and coming back.

Still on the waitlist in September

The August 28 update says the program "will continue to issue new awards to students on the waitlist until all available funding has been allocated," which means the supply is whatever opted-out and unconfirmed money comes back. No schedule for that is published and no closing date is. What is published is the cost of being slow: that cycle had to be completed by September 15 for the full amount and pays 75 percent after it. A later cycle can be expected to carry its own cut-off, but the program sets the date when it issues the awards, so the figure to act on is the one in the award notice, not this one.

Four weeks is the opt-in window on a late award. Before it expires, either a participating school has your child enrolled and has confirmed it in Odyssey, or you have selected homeschool/other. A school still "reviewing the application" on day 27 is the way a late award lapses, because the school's confirmation is a step the parent cannot perform.

And a child who is never reached this year does not carry a place forward. Both the August 11 and August 28 updates state that students not awarded this year must reapply in a future cycle. The waitlist is a 2026-27 instrument. It closes with the year.

What changes in 2027-28, and what does not

Sec. 29.356(b) contains a second ordering that did not apply in year one, when nobody was yet a "participating child." From the second year, applications are approved in this order: (1) siblings of participating children, (2) children who have never ceased participation because of a return to public school, and (3) children who previously left the program by enrolling in a district or charter. The four income-and-disability tiers then apply within each of those groups. A first-time applicant in 2027-28 therefore sits behind every sibling of a current participant, regardless of tier, and ahead of any child who took an account this year and went back to a public school.

Current participants are not in that line at all. The guide says participants who remain in good standing will not need to reapply each year, and the adopted rule at 16.403(c) puts it as a notice of intent to continue rather than a new application. What that notice looks like, and when it is due, has not been published as of this reading. Watch for it; a missed continuation notice is the kind of quiet failure this site exists to flag, and I could not find the form yet.

Two things nobody can tell you today: the private-school amount, which will be recomputed from the 85-percent formula, and the size of the program, which depends on an appropriation that does not exist yet because the 2025 bill's $1 billion cap covers the biennium ending August 31, 2027. The program's homepage points families who missed this cycle to an interest list for 2027-28 and says applications are expected to open in early 2027. The comptroller has not published a date.

The return you file next spring is the document that places you

The tier was the whole game in 2026-27, and the tier came off one document: the Form 1040 on which the child is claimed. For this cycle the guide accepted the 2024 or 2025 return. By the same pattern, the 2027-28 window would look at 2025 or 2026. Double-check that on educationfreedom.texas.gov when the guide for the next cycle posts, and if your household's adjusted gross income sits near the $66,000 or $165,000 line for a family of four, know which year's return puts you where before you decide which one to have ready.

The rest of the folder, from the current guide, is short: a Texas driver license or state ID number (or a utility bill, lease, mortgage statement, voter card, government letter or notarized affidavit if that cannot be verified electronically); your SSN or ITIN; the child's SSN, with a birth certificate, report of birth abroad, naturalization or citizenship certificate, or lawful-admission document as the fallback; and, for a child with a disability, whichever of the four proofs you can obtain, plus a Texas IEP sitting in TEA's system if the money above the base matters to you. Files upload as PDF, JPG, PNG or HEIC at 10 MB or less. The application itself takes ten to twenty minutes. The evaluation that feeds it can take a semester. Start with that one.