The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts has funded 85,344 education savings accounts for the coming school year and left more than 121,000 students on a waiting list, according to the first annual demographic report on the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program. Senate Bill 2, the 2025 law creating the program, required the comptroller to deliver the report to lawmakers by Aug. 1.
The agency received roughly 274,000 applications, found more than 248,000 students eligible and has made more than 122,000 awards, the report says. Some parents have been notified of an award but have not yet confirmed their child’s participation, so funded accounts trail awards. The comptroller’s office calls the year-one waiting list the largest school choice waiting list in the country and says it will update the figures before the 90th Legislature convenes in January 2027.
Two findings answer the question lawmakers argued over in 2025. Almost 25% of participating students have a qualifying disability, and 80% live in a household with income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, which the Texas Tribune puts at roughly $66,000 a year for a family of four.
The tier tables show why. Of 79,652 eligible applicants at or below 200% of poverty, 51,800 were funded. Tier 1, for children with a disability in households at or below 500% of poverty, funded 20,700 students, plus 12,800 siblings awarded alongside them. Tier 3, covering households between 200% and 500% of poverty, funded fewer than 30 students out of 72,644 eligible. The two highest-income tiers, with 13,242 and 53,760 eligible applicants, funded none.
Measured by household income rather than tier, 68,000 funded students come from families at or below 200% of poverty and 17,300 from families between 201% and 500% — most of them disability students and their siblings, who qualify under Tier 1 regardless of where in that range they fall. Fewer than 30 funded students come from households above 500% of poverty, and the report notes those were siblings awarded with a lower-income child under the rule requiring siblings on the same application to be awarded together.
Pre-kindergarten is the largest funded grade, with 9,449 accounts out of 19,497 eligible applicants — a sign the program is reaching families before they enroll in a public school rather than pulling them out of one. Participating private-school students generally receive $10,474 for 2026-27 under the comptroller’s award schedule; students with an individualized education program may receive up to $30,000, and home-schooled students receive $2,000. The Texas Tribune reported that the average award falls between $7,500 and $8,000 and that fewer than 30 students received the full $30,000.
Comptroller Don Huffines, sworn in Aug. 1, framed the results around access. “No Texas child should be trapped in a failing school or forced to attend a school that is unable to provide the services they need to address disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia or auditory processing disorders,” Huffines said in a statement reported by the Tribune.
State Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, an Austin Democrat running against Huffines in November, said the report “proves this program is a billion-dollar handout to exclusive private schools concentrated in big cities, while public schools across the state are underfunded and closing at an alarming rate.”
The report does not say how many participants previously attended public school, a gap that will keep the central dispute unsettled. Earlier program data showed 57% of families invited had not been in public school the prior year. The largest concentrations of participating families sit inside Houston, Dallas and Northside ISD boundaries, the Tribune reported — the districts with the most students to begin with.
The harder number is the waiting list. More than 121,000 students cleared eligibility and got nothing, against a first-year appropriation near $1 billion. The Dispatch has covered the opening of the first education savings account school year and the accountability ratings due this month; the comptroller says fuller participation data will arrive by early September, after waitlisted families take the seats declined by others.