Public school per-pupil spending
Current spending per pupil for public elementary-secondary school systems, by state and the US total, for each fiscal year 2010 through the newest year Census has published.
Publisher
- Organization
- U.S. Census Bureau
- Publisher’s dataset
- Annual Survey of School System Finances, Table 8 (Per Pupil Current Spending)
- File or API used
- https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/school-finances/tables/2024/secondary-education-finance/elsec24_sumtables.xlsx
- Retrieval script
scripts/fetch-census-school-finance.py- Methodology
- https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/school-finances/technical-documentation/methodology.html
Coverage
- Geography
- Nation and every state (50 states plus the District of Columbia)
- Time coverage
- 2010-2024
- Update frequency
- Annual
- Published
- May 7, 2026
- Retrieved
- September 8, 2026
- License
- The compiled file on this page is CC BY 4.0. The underlying records: Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Per-pupil spending | Current spending per pupil for public elementary-secondary school systems, by fiscal year (Census's own fiscal-year numbering, e.g. 2024 for the school year ending in mid-2024). | usd |
Caveats
- Current spending excludes capital outlay and interest on school debt; it is not total expenditure. It covers instruction (salaries, wages, employee benefits), student support, instructional staff support, general administration, and school administration.
- Each fiscal year's figure is read from that fiscal year's own summary workbook (Table 8), not from a later vintage's revised rolling-window table; the two can differ by a small amount for the same year (for example, fiscal year 2020's US figure is 13,500.99 in the FY2020 workbook versus 13,500.81 in the FY2023 workbook's Table 20), and this dataset does not reconcile the difference.
- Census's fiscal year label spans two calendar years for a school year (fiscal year 2024 is roughly July 2023 through June 2024); period is Census's own fiscal year number, not a school-year start year, unlike this project's other education datasets.
- publisherUpdated is Census's press-release date for the newest fiscal year (2024) covered here; each earlier fiscal year in the series was published on its own earlier date, not tracked individually.
- The file Census links per fiscal year is not named consistently: fiscal years 2010-2015 use an 'elsec{yy}_sttables' file, 2016-2021 use 'elsec{yy}_sumtables.xls', and 2022 onward use 'elsec{yy}_sumtables.xlsx'; all three vintages carry the same Table 8 in a sheet named "8".
Pages built on this dataset
Downloads
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “Annual Survey of School System Finances, Table 8 (Per Pupil Current Spending)”, compiled from U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of School System Finances, Table 8 (Per Pupil Current Spending). Retrieved September 8, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/census-school-finance/. CC BY 4.0.
Cite U.S. Census Bureau directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .