Removing the Education Freedom Account Enrollment Cap (and other voucher bills)

February 14th, 2026

Bill Watch:

On Thursday, members of the Senate Education Finance committee voted unanimously to refer SB 581, which would eliminate the enrollment cap on the Education Freedom Account program, to interim study. An interim study referral in the second year of the biennium is essentially a polite death, assuming the full Senate agrees. 

Read why public school should care about the fate of the voucher program

Legislation passed last year expanded voucher eligibility to any New Hampshire family, regardless of income, but limited the total number of voucher recipients to 10,000. There are currently about 10,600 students enrolled in the program. The enrollment cap automatically increases to 12,500 next year. SB 581 would have done away with that 12,500 student cap.

In voting for interim study, members of the committee primarily voiced concerns about expanding the program’s fiscal impact. “The cap is there to provide some amount of predictability and protection for a difficult budget year,” Sen. Murphy said.

The state is spending more than $50 million on the voucher program this school year. We don’t yet have data on where that money is being spent, but in 2024-25, most of the money the state spent on vouchers went to Christian schools. Some money went to schools outside New Hampshire, some went to Amazon, and some went to ski resorts and gymnastics studios. If 12,500 students enroll next year, we project the state will spend more than $60 million on the program.  

So far this session, lawmakers have been unwilling to change much about the EFA program, rejecting bills that would have added academic accountability, increased transparency and oversight, and maintained the 10,000 student cap for a year. The governor has also opted the state into the federal voucher program, which offers another way for families who opt out of the public school system to tap public dollars. 

Research on voucher programs has not found positive effects on academic outcomes. Universal programs, like New Hampshire’s, have also run into other challenges or unintended consequences. In Arizona, universal voucher eligibility led to an increase in the number of nonpublic education providers and an increase in tuition at nonpublic schools. In Florida, an audit found that as the voucher program expanded, it became harder to ensure sound financial practices, resulting in missed and duplicated payments. 

Though interim study is more of a polite way to kill a bill than a call for actual study, here are a few questions lawmakers might ask as they consider further expansions to this program:

  • What are the academic outcomes at the schools that receive voucher money?

  • Have any schools increased their tuition costs or the size of their endowments (beyond what we’d expect based on cost of living increases) since the voucher program began?

  • Does the NH Department of Education have the resources it needs to ensure no missed or duplicated payments?

  • Does the scholarship granting organization have the capacity to effectively monitor the eligibility of students and of expenses as the program grows?

As the bill for the voucher program continues to grow, it will become increasingly critical to understand whether the program is yielding the return taxpayers expect.

 A quick EFA fact check

If you have followed coverage of the EFA program, including from Reaching Higher NH, you have likely heard that most vouchers are going to students who were already in private school or home education – that is, vouchers are subsidizing choices that families were previously paying for themselves, or with financial aid from a private school. 

In a hearing Tuesday, Sen. Sullivan argued that what this statement misses is the “large percentage” of EFA students who were previously receiving an Education Tax Credit (ETC), a program established in 2012 to “attend a private school, online school, or homeschool”. Her implication was that since the ETC program is restricted to students whose families earn less than 300% of the federal poverty level, ETC students who enrolled in the EFA program were still students who needed the financial support of a voucher. 

This claim doesn’t quite hold, however. ETC students, by virtue of their low incomes, would have been eligible for an EFA before the expansion, so it’s unlikely there was a dramatic increase in ETC students taking an EFA this year. In addition, the fiscal note on HB 1803 says that 95% of ETC students in 2024 were also receiving an EFA. According to the Children Scholarship Fund-NH’s website, 827 students received an ETC that year. That means that, at most, 42 of this year’s 5,000 new EFA recipients were ETC recipients. 

It is also worth noting that the number of voucher students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch dropped this year – both as a share of total enrollments and as a raw number. If there truly were an influx of ETC students accessing EFAs, we’d have expected that number to go up.

While it is certainly possible that some of the families who were already in private school before taking a voucher have real financial need, the data show that this is not the case for most of them.