Florida School Choice Scholarships: FTC, FES-EO, FES-UA, and PEP

More than 200,000 Florida families applied in the first three days of the 2026-27 cycle. Nearly every private school in the state participates, which means choice schools Florida families can actually use are no longer scarce. Award amounts land around $8,000 for most students and closer to $10,000 for students with documented disabilities.

And a Florida admissions director somewhere this morning could not explain to a family on the phone what the difference is between FTC and FES-EO.

Both of those facts describe the same market. Florida has been universal since July 2023, which makes it the most mature school choice environment in the country and the clearest preview of where every other choice state is heading. This article covers what the four programs actually are, what schools are legally allowed to do about them, and the harder question underneath: what a school competes on once the money stops being a reason to choose it.

Program details are current as of August 2026. Florida's Legislature sets award amounts annually and publishes them in summer, so verify anything you put on your own website against Step Up For Students or the Florida Department of Education before publishing it.

Quick Answers

What are Florida's school choice scholarships? Four programs, administered primarily by Step Up For Students with a second organization, AAA Scholarship Foundation, also participating. The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) and Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options (FES-EO) fund private school enrollment at roughly $8,000. FES-UA serves students with disabilities at roughly $10,000 or more. The Personalized Education Program (PEP) funds parent-directed education outside full-time school enrollment.

Does accepting them still help us stand out? No, and that is the most important strategic fact about the Florida voucher program landscape. When participation is near-universal among private schools and eligibility is universal among families, accepting the scholarship is table stakes. It is necessary and it differentiates nothing.

The Four Florida School Voucher Programs, Plainly

Every Florida school voucher program traces back to HB 1, signed in March 2023 and effective July 1 that year, which extended eligibility to all K-12 students regardless of household income and converted the scholarships into education savings accounts. In practice, a Florida ESA and a Florida voucher now describe the same instrument. The acronyms that resulted are genuinely confusing, and families arrive at your office using them incorrectly. Here is the honest version.

Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) and Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options (FES-EO)

The FES EO scholarship and its FTC counterpart fund the same thing: full-time enrollment at an eligible private school, at roughly $8,000 on average, varying by county and grade level. Both are open to any Florida student eligible for public K-12, regardless of income, with priority going to renewing students, lower-income households, and students in foster care.

The thing schools get wrong: families cannot control which one they receive, and it does not matter to you. Students eligible for both are awarded FTC until FTC funding is exhausted, then FES-EO. A family sometimes gets FTC when they applied expecting FES-EO and worries something went wrong. Nothing went wrong. Train your front office to say exactly that.

Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities (FES-UA)

The FES UA scholarship is the most valuable and least understood program in the state. It is an education savings account for students ages 3 through 22 with a qualifying diagnosis or IEP, averaging around $10,000 and running substantially higher for students at the upper disability matrix levels. Funds cover tuition, therapies, specialists, curriculum, technology, and more.

The thing schools get wrong: not telling families it exists. A family with a child who has a documented diagnosis may be applying for the wrong FES UA scholarship alternative and leaving thousands of dollars unclaimed, simply because nobody at the school mentioned that a separate program pays more and covers more. If your school serves students with learning differences, this is the single most useful sentence on your admissions page.

Personalized Education Program (PEP)

The PEP Florida scholarship is for students who are not enrolled full time in a public or private school, funding parent-directed education at roughly $8,000 with capacity for 140,000 students in 2026-27. It is the program most private schools ignore, and mostly they should.

The exception worth knowing: if your school runs a hybrid, university-model, or part-time program, PEP may be the relevant funding stream rather than FTC or FES-EO, and the eligibility rules for PEP hybrid participation are separate and require FLDOE approval. If any part of your enrollment is less than full time, read the provider handbook carefully rather than assuming.

What Happened to Hope and New Worlds

Two programs changed, and schools still reference them. The Hope Scholarship, for students who experienced bullying or violence at a public school, was folded into FTC and FES-EO. And the Legislature provided no new funding for New Worlds Scholarship Accounts, the $1,200 K-5 reading and math program, with existing accounts subject to closure after a year of inactivity. If either appears on your website, it needs to come down.

Which One Fits Which Family

Here is the whole thing at a glance, using one hypothetical family for scale. Say a school charges $14,000 a year. What each program actually does to that number depends entirely on the child, and a family that picks the wrong one cannot simply switch, because Florida allows only one scholarship at a time.

Program	The family it fits	What it does to a $14,000 tuition bill
FTC or FES-EO (Florida Tax Credit / Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options)	Any Florida student enrolling full time at a private school, regardless of household income. Priority goes to renewals, lower-income families, and foster care.	About $8,000 toward tuition, leaving roughly $6,000 for the family to cover through your financial aid, a payment plan, or out of pocket.
FES-UA (Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities)	A student ages 3 to 22 with a qualifying diagnosis or IEP. No income limit.	About $10,000 or more depending on the disability matrix level, leaving roughly $4,000. It also covers therapies, specialists, and technology that the other programs do not, so the real gap is often smaller still.
PEP (Personalized Education Program)	A student NOT enrolled full time in a public or private school. Homeschool and parent-directed education.	Nothing, and this is the trap. PEP pays about $8,000, but it cannot be used for full-time private school enrollment. A family that chooses PEP for a full-time seat has picked the wrong program and cannot hold another one that year.

Award amounts are set annually by the Florida Legislature and published in summer. Figures above are approximate for 2026-27 and vary by county and grade level. Verify current amounts with Step Up For Students.

Two things that table is teaching, and both cost families money. First, PEP looks like free tuition money and is not, at least not for a full-time private school seat. Second, a family with a child who has a documented diagnosis who applies for FTC instead of FES-UA leaves roughly $2,000 and a category of covered services on the table, and cannot switch that year. If your school serves students with learning differences and your website does not say this clearly, it is costing your families real dollars.

The Calendar Schools Keep Missing

The Florida voucher program timeline is fixed by the funding organizations, not by your admissions office, and it starts earlier than most schools plan for.

The Step Up For Students application window opens February 1 each year. The renewal priority deadline falls around April 30, and missing it costs a returning family their priority status. New applicants have until roughly mid-November, with an accept-or-decline deadline in December. Funding then arrives quarterly rather than in a lump: an initial payment in August for returning students and September for newly approved ones, followed by payments in November, February, and April, all processed through the EMA portal.

The operational trap: award amounts are set annually by the Legislature and published in summer. Which means every number on your website is wrong from roughly June until you update it. Put a summer calendar reminder on it, because a family who budgets from a stale figure and finds out in August is a family with a grievance.

One more rule that surprises people: a student can hold only one of these scholarships at a time, and a student who enrolls in a public school loses the scholarship entirely, with remaining funds returned to the state.

What Florida Schools Legally Cannot Do

This is short, and almost nobody writes it down. Parents must create the account and submit the application themselves. Private schools and service providers are barred from submitting applications on a family's behalf.

What you can put on the page, all of it permitted and almost none of it common:

• Which of the four programs fits which kind of family, in one comparison a parent can scan in thirty seconds.

• The documents to gather before starting, since incomplete applications are the most common delay.

• Every deadline that applies, including the renewal priority date that returning families forget.

• What happens after approval, including how quarterly funding works and when your school gets paid.

• A named person to call with a direct line, not a general admissions inbox.

• An explicit note that you cannot submit for them but will sit with them while they do it.

That sounds like a limitation. It is actually the entire opportunity, because it means the only lever a school has is education, and almost no school is pulling it. You cannot do it for them. You can explain which of four programs fits their child, what documentation they need before they start, when the deadlines fall, and what happens after they are approved. A school that does that well has differentiated itself using nothing but a well-built page and a trained front office. Our guidance on admissions page design covers the structure.

Wondering whether your school's scholarship page is doing any of this? Request a free mini digital marketing audit.

School Voucher Programs: Marketing in a Market Where Everyone Has the Money

Here is the strategic reality that Florida reached first and every other choice state is heading toward.

When eligibility is universal and participation is near-universal, the scholarship stops functioning as a competitive advantage. Advertising that you accept it is like a high school advertising that it offers algebra. True, necessary, and completely undifferentiating, because so does everyone else. The catalog line that matters is the one nobody else can print.

What that does to a market is subtle but total. Price, which used to filter families before they ever inquired, no longer filters much of anything. A family holding a Florida private school voucher worth $8,000 can consider schools that were previously unthinkable, which means your applicant pool got broader and so did everyone else's. The families who would have chosen you on affordability alone will now choose on something else, and if you have not named what that something else is, they will choose someone who has.

The practical shift: stop leading with the scholarship and start leading with what a Tuesday feels like. Outcomes, program specifics, teacher tenure, class size, what happens when a student struggles, how the community actually behaves. All of it was always true. The money was simply obscuring it, and now it isn't.

The uncomfortable corollary is worth stating plainly: in a saturated choice market, growth mostly means being chosen over another participating school. That is a harder sentence than "the money brought us families," and it is the accurate one. It also makes keeping the families you already have the cheapest growth available, which we cover in what to show families who are already enrolled.

Florida Is Three Years Ahead. Here's What Its Schools Learned.

Choice schools Florida operates today look nothing like they did in 2022, and if you run a school outside the state, this is the section worth your time, because Florida's three-year head start is the closest thing to a forecast anyone has. Think of Florida as the pilot school for a program the whole district is about to adopt. Everyone else gets to watch what broke before running it themselves, and the only real question is whether they bother reading the report. Four lessons transfer regardless of where you are.

The first year is not the hard year. Enrollment surges in year one the way a new elective fills its first semester. Everyone signs up because it is new. The interesting number is who signs up again the following year, once it is just another course in the catalog. Year one of any program produces a surge, headlines, and a lot of schools feeling successful. The difficulty arrives in years two and three, when the novelty fades, competitors catch up, and the families who arrived through a portal rather than a relationship decide whether to stay. Texas is living year one right now. Florida is living year four.

Vocabulary beats policy language every time. Florida families say "Step Up," "FES-UA," and "PEP." They do not say "school choice funding." A school whose website uses administrative language while its families use brand names has made itself hard to find. Whatever your state's program is called, use that exact name in your headings, your page title, and your URL.

The special-needs program is always the underexplained one. In Florida it is the FES UA scholarship at roughly $10,000, meaningfully more than the standard award, and families routinely do not know it exists. Nearly every state running a Florida ESA style structure has a disability tier that pays more and is explained less. Find yours and put it in writing.

Administrative clarity is a marketing asset. The schools families praise in a mature market are the ones that made the process comprehensible: which program, what documents, which deadline, who to call. That is not marketing in any traditional sense, and it converts better than most things that are.

If Your State Just Passed a Program

Texas, Tennessee, Utah, Wyoming, Louisiana, and every state entering its first or second cycle: you have a window that Florida schools no longer have. Right now the money is still a differentiator, because participation is uneven and families are still learning what exists. That window closes in roughly two to three years.

Use it for two things. Capture aggressively while the advantage lasts, since the families you enroll now are the ones you will still have when the market saturates. And build the differentiation story in parallel, before you need it. The schools that spend year one only on "we accept the funding" will spend year three discovering they never developed a reason to be chosen.

If Your State Is Debating One

Run the hypothetical honestly. If a universal program passed in your state next session with an $8,000 award, what would change about your applicant pool? For most schools the answer is that a large group of families who currently self-select out on price would suddenly be in the market, and your competitors would be reaching them at the same moment you are.

What to do about that now, with no program in place: understand your local competitive set, because the schools you would compete against are the same ones, only with price neutralized. Know which nearby schools would participate and how their tuition compares to a hypothetical award. And build the affordability content anyway, since families are already searching for how to pay for private school tuition whether or not your legislature acts.

If Your State Has No Program and No Prospect of One

Roughly half the country is here, including Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. The Florida findings still transfer, because most of them were never really about the money.

Adopting these disciplines before your state acts is studying for an exam that has not been scheduled. It feels like wasted effort right up until the date gets announced, at which point everyone else starts from zero and you do not. Vocabulary matching, administrative clarity, explaining your own aid programs the way Florida schools should be explaining FES-UA, and differentiating on something other than price are all available to you today at no cost. Florida schools were forced into these disciplines by market saturation. You can adopt them by choice, and against competitors who have not been forced into anything.

There is also one piece of national news that does reach you regardless: the federal scholarship tax credit begins in 2027 and functions differently from state programs, with consequences specific to states that have not opted in. Our guide for development offices covers it.

Common Mistakes

The mistake: leading with the scholarship in a market where everyone accepts it.

The fix: state participation clearly and early, then spend the rest of the page on why a family would choose you specifically.

The mistake: publishing award amounts and never updating them.

The fix: the Legislature resets the numbers every summer. Calendar a June or July review, and link to the live source rather than restating figures.

The mistake: assuming families understand the difference between the programs.

The fix: they do not, and the FES-UA gap costs families thousands. One clear comparison on your site does more good than any ad.

The mistake: offering to submit the application for a family.

The fix: you legally cannot. Offer to walk them through it instead, which is nearly as helpful and entirely permitted.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between the FTC and FES EO scholarship?

Functionally very little for a school. Both fund full-time private school enrollment at roughly $8,000 and both are open to any eligible Florida student regardless of income. The difference is the funding mechanism, and students eligible for both receive FTC until that funding is exhausted. Families cannot choose between them.

How much is the Florida school voucher program worth per student?

A Florida private school voucher runs roughly $8,000 on average for FTC and FES-EO, varying by county and grade level, and roughly $10,000 or more for FES-UA depending on the student's disability matrix level. Amounts are set annually by the Legislature and published in summer, so check the current figures rather than relying on last year's.

Can our school apply on behalf of a family?

No. Florida requires parents to create their own account and submit the application themselves, and private schools and providers are prohibited from submitting on a family's behalf. You can explain the process, help them gather documentation, and answer questions.

What is the PEP Florida scholarship for?

PEP funds parent-directed education for students not enrolled full time in a public or private school, at roughly $8,000 with capacity for 140,000 students in 2026-27. It generally does not apply to traditional full-time private school enrollment, though schools running approved hybrid programs may be eligible under separate FLDOE rules.

When does the Step Up For Students application open?

Applications open February 1. Renewal families should apply by the April 30 priority deadline, and new applicants have until roughly mid-November with a December accept-or-decline deadline. Applying early matters because funding is finite and priority tiers determine who is served first.

Can a student hold more than one scholarship?

No. A student may hold only one private school or parent-directed scholarship at a time. A family denied FES-UA may then apply for a private school scholarship, but they cannot stack them.

What happens if a student returns to public school?

The scholarship ends and remaining funds return to the state. Depending on circumstances the student may be eligible for other public-school-side programs, but the private school scholarship does not continue.

The Money Was Never the Whole Story

Florida spent three years proving something the rest of the country is about to learn: a scholarship program can transform who can afford your school without doing anything at all about why they should choose it. The schools thriving in Florida now are not the ones that accepted the money first. They are the ones that used the window to get clear about what they actually offer, and then said it well.

That work is what YPM Studio does for private, Catholic, Christian, and charter schools, in choice states and in states still waiting: the enrollment marketing system behind the announcement. When The School of the Cathedral put a real system behind their story, the results were 97% parent participation, doubled unique donors, a 95% increase in total gifts, and 400+ communications a year without adding staff.

If your scholarship page says you accept the money and not much else, book a free 20-minute consultation. We will tell you what it is missing and what your competitors are already saying.