Texas TEFA 2026: What Homeschool Families Actually Get

What TEFA actually is

The Texas Education Freedom Accounts program (TEFA) was created by Senate Bill 2 in the 89th Texas Legislature, passed May 3, 2025 and effective September 1, 2025. The Texas Comptroller’s final-rules press release confirms the program is administered by the Comptroller of Public Accounts with an initial $1 billion appropriation and roughly 100,000 accounts available in year one.

The program has three funding tiers:

• Accredited private-school students: $10,474 per year for 2026-27, set by the Texas Education Agency at 85% of the estimated statewide average of state and local funding per student in average daily attendance.
• Students with an IEP on file: up to $30,000 per year, with the allotment based on the funding the student’s district would receive for IEP services.
• Homeschool students: a flat $2,000 per year, for children educated at home or not enrolled in a Texas public school. The program portal states that an awarded child “who is homeschooled or is not enrolled in a public school or a pre-K or kindergarten program will receive $2,000 annually” (retrieved June 2026).

The $2,000 homeschool amount does not scale with income, family size, or grade level. Every eligible homeschooled child, kindergarten through twelfth grade, receives the same $2,000.

The 2026 award results: 95,600 funded, most applicants not

The first application window closed March 31, 2026 with more than 274,000 student applications, per the Comptroller’s April 2, 2026 overview. About 43,000 students applied on the first day. Nearly three-quarters of applicants came from low- or middle-income households. Roughly 30,000 applicants qualified for the top priority tier (students with disabilities in households at or below 500% of the federal poverty level), and roughly 79,000 qualified for the second tier (students in low-income households).

Awards went out in two rounds:

• April 22-24, 2026: more than 42,600 students received award notices, covering every applicant in the top priority tier plus their siblings. Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock noted that “the Legislature made low- and middle-income students with disabilities the first priority for the first year of school choice here in Texas.”
• May 4-6, 2026: more than 53,000 additional students received awards after a lottery among second-tier applicants, whose demand exceeded the remaining funding. That brought the funded total above 95,600.

The arithmetic is blunt: roughly 95,600 awards against 274,000+ applications means almost two of every three applicants landed on the waitlist or outside the program. The Comptroller states that additional funding is likely to reach waitlisted students as awarded families opt out or fail to confirm by the July 15 deadline. Awarded parents have 30 days from notification to appeal a funding determination.

Who qualified, and what participation requires

Per the TEFA eligibility page and the Parent Application Guide, there were four gating criteria:

1. Texas residency. The student must reside in Texas with a parent or legal guardian.
2. Age and grade. Kindergarten through twelfth grade, with the student at least five years old on September 1 of the funding year.
3. No concurrent public enrollment. A child cannot receive TEFA funds while enrolled in a Texas public school; withdrawal must precede participation.
4. Application in the annual window. For 2026-27, the window ran February 4 through March 31, 2026 and is now closed. The next window is expected to open in early 2027; monitor educationfreedom.texas.gov.

There is no income cap and no prior-public-school requirement. SB 2 establishes a priority order when applications exceed capacity, and in 2026-27 they did: students with disabilities and low-income families received higher priority, the top tier was funded in full, and the second tier went to lottery.

Families who accept TEFA funds must complete a nationally norm-referenced achievement test annually (Iowa, Stanford, TerraNova, CLT, and other approved tests) and submit results. Texas homeschoolers who do not enroll in TEFA face no state testing requirement, a consequence of Texas Education Agency v. Leeper (Tex. 1994). Annual testing is the compliance cost of participating in TEFA.

What the $2,000 actually buys

The TEFA families page lists the approved expense categories (retrieved June 2026):

• Tuition and fees at a private school, higher education provider, online educational course or program, or program that provides training for an industry-based credential.
• Textbooks or other instructional materials, the core category for at-home learning families: curriculum, workbooks, and related materials.
• Private tutoring from approved providers.
• Academic assessment costs, including the required annual nationally norm-referenced test.
• Educational therapies not covered by any federal, state, or local government benefits.
• Computer hardware or software, capped at 10 percent of the total amount transferred ($200 of a $2,000 homeschool account).
• Transportation to and from approved providers.
• Required uniforms, certain school-district class fees, and meals provided by a private school, categories that rarely apply to at-home learning accounts.

Every purchase must come from a provider or vendor approved into the program. The Comptroller’s rules bar paying family members, withdrawing cash, and reselling items bought with program money, per the adopted program rules (34 TAC §§16.401-16.410).

How funds flow: marketplace only, no reimbursement

Odyssey administers the program as its certified educational assistance organization (CEAO). The account is not a debit card and not a reimbursement program. It is a closed procurement system, and the legal basis is explicit. Texas Education Code §29.360(f) forbids reimbursements outright, a prohibition the Comptroller declined to soften when commenters requested a receipt-submission alternative during rulemaking, per the adopted rules published in the Texas Register (December 2025).

The mechanics, from the same rules:

1. All purchases run through a Comptroller-approved payment system accessible through the program’s website (34 TAC §16.407(g)). The rule as adopted states that a Comptroller-approved purchasing system “is the only permissible mechanism” for approved purchases.
2. The CEAO verifies each purchase: the expense must be approved, the provider in good standing, the child in good standing, and the total within the account balance. The purchase amount is then deducted from the account.
3. Parents attest, under penalty of perjury, that they will not attempt to withdraw cash or seek reimbursement from the child’s account, and will not resell items purchased with program money (34 TAC §16.403(b)(4)(B)).
4. Refunds return to the account, not to the parent. A vendor refunding a returned product pays the CEAO, which deposits the money back into the child’s account.

The practical consequence for at-home learning families: if a preferred publisher is not in the TEFA marketplace, there is no workaround. A family cannot buy the materials at retail and submit the receipt. Vendors apply separately to join, on a rolling basis, per the program’s providers and vendors page, and all vendor offerings are reviewed by Odyssey and the Comptroller before appearing in the marketplace. The Comptroller’s December 2025 announcement reported hundreds of schools and providers enrolled; a complete public vendor list has not been published.

Correction (June 10, 2026): an earlier version of this guide described receipt reimbursement as a second way to deploy TEFA funds. That was wrong. Education Code §29.360(f) forbids reimbursement, and the adopted rules make the approved payment system the only purchase mechanism.

Spending the $2,000 well: three sample plans

With 100% of the homeschool award arriving July 1, 2026, families face a planning question rather than a cash-flow question: what does $2,000 buy for a full school year? The three plans below price a complete year for one elementary student (a second grader) at three spending levels, using publisher list prices retrieved June 2026. They are illustrations, not endorsements, and they are not statements of TEFA marketplace availability. Whether a given publisher’s materials can be bought with TEFA funds depends on that vendor’s approval status in the Odyssey marketplace, which families must confirm in the portal before counting on any line item.

Plan 1: the four-subject core, about $530

One complete, well-regarded program per subject, bought à la carte. This covers math, reading, history, and science and leaves nearly $1,470 of the award for the required annual assessment, tutoring, a co-op’s educational fees, or technology (within the 10% cap).

A single-vendor variant of the same idea: Master Books sells a Grade 2 Basic 4 Subject Set at $203.96 list ($163.16 sale, retrieved June 2026), which puts a four-subject core under $210 and leaves even more of the award for services.

Plan 2: boxed classical core plus reading intervention, about $915

A full-grade boxed program as the spine, with a dedicated reading and spelling sequence layered on for a student who needs explicit phonics work.

This plan leaves roughly $1,085 for the annual assessment fee, a weekly tutoring block, or therapies. Note the overlap risk in any boxed-plus-supplement plan: the Memoria Press set already includes phonics and spelling, so the All About Learning sequence here is a deliberate redundancy for a struggling reader, not a requirement.

Plan 3: literature-rich complete package, about $1,620

A complete all-subjects package from a single publisher, plus targeted supplements, for a family that wants the year planned and boxed.

The remaining $380 or so covers the required nationally norm-referenced test and approved consumable supplies, with margin for a price increase between June and the family’s actual order date.

All prices are as published on each publisher’s own site, retrieved June 2026, and subject to change. TEFA eligibility for any specific item is determined by the vendor’s approval status in the Odyssey marketplace and the Comptroller’s expense rules, not by the publisher.

The $8,474 funding gap

Texas pays private-school students $10,474 per year. It pays homeschool students $2,000. That $8,474 gap is statutory, not administrative.

The gap reflects a legislative policy judgment embedded in SB 2. The private-school figure is tied to 85% of statewide per-pupil funding, calibrated to cover a meaningful portion of private-school tuition. The homeschool figure is set by the legislature at $2,000 per child and does not scale with enrollment or cost.

As the sample plans above show, $2,000 funds a complete single-student curriculum year with room to spare at most spending levels, but a family running a premium boxed program plus outside tutoring can exceed it. Families using primarily free digital resources and library materials often find $2,000 covers the full annual budget.

TEFA participation also introduces oversight: annual nationally norm-referenced testing, expense-category approval, marketplace-only purchasing, and periodic State Auditor compliance audits per the program’s families page. Families who prefer independence from program oversight may prefer to pay out of pocket. The trade-off is real and worth pricing honestly against each family’s own budget.

Timeline and deadlines

The 2026-27 cycle, per the Comptroller’s April 22 and May 4 award releases and the TEFA program page (retrieved June 2026):

The at-home learning disbursement is the notable one: the program portal states that homeschool and other non-enrolled students receive 100% of their award on July 1, 2026, while private-school students are paid in three installments across the year. A homeschool family can plan its entire curriculum order in one pass in July.

For 2027-28, the Comptroller has indicated a similar February–March window. Families should monitor educationfreedom.texas.gov beginning in January 2027 for the confirmed opening date.

How Texas compares to other ESA states

Homeschool amounts vary widely across the four largest 2026 ESA programs:

On dollar amount per homeschool student, Texas is the lowest of the four. On compliance burden, Texas sits in the middle: less oversight than Florida’s student learning plan requirement, comparable to Arizona’s expense-review model. Texas’s marketplace-only purchasing is stricter than West Virginia’s Hope Scholarship, which permits reimbursement-style flows through its portal.

Publisher availability in the marketplace

Odyssey and the Comptroller review every vendor before its products appear in the TEFA marketplace, per the providers and vendors page, and vendor applications are accepted on a rolling basis. No complete public vendor list has been published as of June 2026, so the only authoritative check is the family’s own Odyssey portal after July 1. The following publishers have stated Texas marketplace presence or active vendor applications in their own program communications, and families should confirm each at checkout:

Language arts / reading

1. The Good and the Beautiful (digital materials free, print titles priced per publisher site)
2. Logic of English Foundations
3. All About Reading / All About Spelling

Math

1. Math-U-See
2. Singapore Math
3. Saxon Math

Complete programs

1. Abeka K5 Complete Kit
2. BJU Press K5 Complete Textbook Kit
3. Sonlight Kindergarten All-Subjects Package
4. Memoria Press Kindergarten Customizable Set

TEFA eligibility for specific items is set by Odyssey and the Texas Comptroller, not by the publisher.