New Hampshire’s Voucher Program is Paying For Choices Parents Have Already Made
December 12th, 2025
Only 343 students left their district public school for the Education Freedom Account voucher program this year, in spite of new legislation dramatically expanding eligibility.
According to data released by the NH Department of Education, the total number of voucher recipients increased by 4,745 this year. The number of new enrollments is likely higher, given that every year approximately 20% of voucher students leave the program, whether because they graduate, choose a different educational pathway, or leave the state. (We estimate the number of new voucher recipients is around 6,000, though the Department’s fact sheet doesn’t include this data point.) We have previously written about how the expansion has changed the demographics of the program, which now serves fewer families with low incomes.
Despite nearly doubling the number of students in the voucher program, however, the expansion has hardly caused families to run from their local public school. The number of students leaving their district school for the voucher program increased by only 46 students this year.
Source: NH Department of Education, Division of Analytics and Resources; November 2025 Education Freedom Account Data Fact Sheet.
In fact, the number of students switching from public school to the voucher program has shrunk as a share of total new voucher recipients. This indicates that the vast majority of families newly enrolling in the voucher program were already sending their students somewhere other than their local public school.
Notes: The number of new recipients is the difference of the current year’s enrollment and the previous year’s enrollment, less attrition. We assume a 22% attrition rate, the average rate from 2022-2024, the last year for which the data is available. We do not include kindergarten enrollments in the new recipient count, since no kindergarteners would be switching from a local district. To ensure consistency, we use enrollment numbers from the November 2025 report across all years.
Sources: NH Department of Education, Division of Analytics and Resources; November 2025 Education Freedom Account Data Fact Sheet and September 2024 Education Freedom Account Financial Fact Sheet.
This new data supports the trends we see in the public school enrollment data, which show that even with a declining number of students across the state, public schools still serve 90% of New Hampshire’s students. Taken together, the data indicates that the voucher program is not creating new opportunities, but rather is subsidizing choices families had already made – and doing so at increased taxpayer expense. When a student leaves a public school for the voucher program, it effectively shifts the money the state spends on that student from the local district to the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which administers the EFA program. But when a student already attending a private school takes a voucher, it becomes a new expense for the state. Prior to the voucher program, families who opted out of the public school system also opted out of public funding for education – so when those students receive a voucher, it’s an additional cost to the state, not a shift in cost. That means that this school year alone, the state will spend at least $20 million (a conservative estimate) from the Education Trust Fund on students who were not part of the state’s education budget last year. Increasing the demands on the Education Trust Fund by funding private education will only make it harder for the state to fund its public schools, which still educate most Granite State students, fairly and adequately.
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