(for an interactive version of this map, click here)
Now that ECCA the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has been enacted, I wanted to take a dive into some of the numbers. More specifically, I wanted to see what shook out when computing “300 percent of the area median gross income” (as such term is used to calculate student eligibility in section 42).
Thankfully, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has much more up-to-date data than the U.S. Department of Education so we can actually use 2024-25 data instead of 2023-24.
It didn’t take much digging to find HUD’s FY 2025 Income Limits Documentation System. From there, I downloaded the file and tried to plug it into a county-level map. However, there are several of the original states that split off data by town and not just county so I had to do a fair amount of cleaning and de-duping. Caveat: I am not an expert in the geographies of the aforementioned states so if a single county had multiple limits in the dataset I erred towards using the higher number.
The range is wide. In Greene County, Alabama, 300% of the area median gross income is $133,200. In Marin County, California, it’s $557,100. In Marion County, Indiana (home of EdChoice) 300% of the area median gross income is $332,100.
A few final words:
- Students will likely not be able to participate until Fall 2027 at the earliest, so the source HUD amounts will be updated twice between now and then.
- A single parent household is treated the same as a dual-income household and the income limit is the income limit, regardless of how many people are members of the household. Unlike the majority of state-level means-tested programs, there is no sliding scale amount based on how many children are in the family or household.
- Hopefully the 15 states currently without a state-level private educational choice program have their governor opt them into the program.
- However, if not, hopefully there are savvy individuals in the state that can take advantage of the bill language: “The election (to participate) shall be made by the Governor of the State or by such other individual, agency, or entity as is designated under State law to make such elections on behalf of the State with respect to Federal tax benefits.” (emphasis mine)
Please capitalize on the work I already did and download the dataset directly from the map to use yourself!
This was originally published to our Substack.
