Statewide

Who is on the guarantee # ↑ ContentsFY2027FY2027 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW FY27 TRAD State Foundation Funding Calculator.

74% of the wealthiest fifth of districts are on the guarantee, against 12% of the poorest. Districts grouped into fifths by assessed valuation per pupil, poorest at the top. The guarantee was written as transitional relief for districts losing students; the pattern it actually produces is a wealth gradient.

Median valuation per pupil statewide is $247,848.

Does state aid offset property wealth? # ↑ ContentsFY2027 · valuation FY2024FY2027 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW FY27 TRAD State Foundation Funding Calculator. And valuation: FY2024 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW District Profile Report.

State aid falls as property wealth rises, and the guarantee holds up the top end: it pays $1,542 per pupil above the formula among the wealthiest tenth of districts and $26 among the least wealthy. One dot per district: the assessed valuation each of its pupils stands on, against the state aid each of them receives. A compensating formula slopes down to the right, and this one does. The two lines are medians through ten equal-count groups of districts — one of what the formula computes, one of what is actually paid. Both scales are logarithmic, because valuation per pupil spans seventeen times and aid per pupil thirty; on a linear axis nine districts in ten sit in the left-hand third.

The gap between the two lines is what the guarantee costs the equalization. The formula would pay the wealthy districts least, and the guarantee is what stops it. Which districts those are is the card above this one. Read as correlations against valuation per pupil, the formula alone reaches −0.662 and what districts receive reaches −0.605; a perfectly compensating formula would be strongly negative.

Two floors # ↑ ContentsFY2027 · millage 2024FY2027 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW FY27 TRAD State Foundation Funding Calculator. And millage: 2024 — tax year, a calendar year of valuation and levy. Source: Department of Taxation, Table SD-1.

At the 20-mill floor, H.B. 920's tax reduction factors stop applying and rising property values reach district revenue — the only districts in Ohio for which that is true. At the minimum state share, the entire local capacity measure determines nothing: those districts receive a flat percentage of base cost however wealthy they are. That minimum is 10% in this model, not the 5% the Fair School Funding Plan was enacted with — each biennial budget sets it.

The millage floor is visible in the tax record, not only in the statute. Across TY2023 and TY2024, 301 of the 416 districts that began above the floor saw their effective Class I rate fall as reduction factors rolled it back; of the 193 that began at it, 9 did. 97.1% of every effective-rate reduction in Ohio happens above the floor, which is what it means to say reduction factors stop there — and why a reappraisal reaches one district's revenue and not another's.

And the size of it: the median district has lost 42% of the millage its voters approved. The median voted current operating rate is 42.31 mills; the median rate anyone pays is 23.40. Nobody decided that. It is reduction factors applied a hundredth of a mill at a time across the life of every levy, which is why a district can pass a levy, watch its tax base grow, and still return to the ballot.

Real property tax charged for current expenses is a median 36% of what a district spends on operations, and 3 districts are charged more than they spend. A mill is the same rate everywhere and raises $63 per pupil in the district where it raises least and $21,025 where it raises most — a factor of 336, against a median of $227. Comparing two districts' tax rates without that number compares effort to capacity. Each district's own figures are on its property tax page, from the Department of Taxation's Table SD-1.

The mechanism this one replaced would charge half the state for revenue it cannot raise. Before the Fair School Funding Plan a district's own share was a flat 23 mills against its valuation, uniform statewide — and H.B. 920 guarantees districts cannot all levy at one rate. 309 of 609 have an effective Class I rate below 23 mills today, and 65 have valuation high enough that the charge-off would take their whole base cost and leave nothing, having no minimum state share to stop at. Ohio's answer was a supplement rather than a fix. Against that counterfactual districts are a median $47 per pupil worse off under the plan.

The six funding units # ↑ ContentsFY2027 · scholarships 2024-25FY2027 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: DEW FY27 TRAD State Foundation Funding Calculator. And scholarships: 2024-25 — school year, September to June. Source: DEW 2025 Scholarship Annual Report.

R.C. 3317.022 computes six funding units, and everything else on this site is the first of them. There is no deduction routing money out of a district to a community school or a scholarship — the Fair School Funding Plan abolished it. The other five are computed beside the district unit and paid directly, which is why a district's page shows no charge for them and why the totals above are not what Ohio spends on schooling.

The six are not a column that adds up, and nothing here totals them. Two of the rows are the department's FY2027 model — what the formula computes, before a year of it has been paid — and four are its account of a school year that is over. They are also on different reckonings: a fiscal year runs July to June and a school year September to June. Each amount therefore carries its own year beside it, and a reader who wants one number for Ohio will not find it here because the published sources do not support one.

One of the five figures is derived rather than quoted. The Jon Peterson special needs scholarship unit publishes participation and its expenditure by disability category, and does not total the categories. The $103.9M shown for it is that sum, computed here. The department's own four-program total, which excludes it, is $991.2M. Why the derived figure travels with the published one rather than in the fixture is a recorded decision.

There is no scenario lever for any of these. Every lever on this site prices a change across the district panel, and a scholarship is not per district — nothing published says which district one was charged against. See what this site does not model.

Nonpublic school support # ↑ ContentsFY2027FY2027 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: Legislative Service Commission, Category 3 nonpublic school support.

State money for pupils in chartered nonpublic schools that is not one of the six funding units and not a scholarship. It is appropriated by line item and paid to districts and to the schools themselves for services — health, guidance, textbooks, testing, and the cost of the state's own paperwork. Shown as enacted, before any adjustment.

These lines may be added, and are, because all three are the same kind of figure in the same fiscal year — which is the difference between this table and the one above it.

Federal money beside it

Federal grants that buy services for the same pupils through public agencies. They are not Category 3 and are not added to it, or to each other: each row is at its own year.

Whether Ohio is unusual # ↑ ContentsFY2022FY2022 — fiscal year, July to June. Source: Census Bureau, Annual Survey of School System Finances.

Ohio raises 51.8% of its school money locally, against 43.4% nationally — more than 44 states. Everything else on this site is Ohio describing itself. This is the Census Bureau counting every school system in the country on one set of definitions, for FY2022 — the only figures here that can say whether what Ohio does is normal.

Drawn: the six highest-share states, Ohio, and the national figure.

Ohio spends about what the country spends and raises it differently. Current spending per pupil is $14,923 against a national $15,801, and the federal share is within a point of the national figure. What is distinctive is the split between the other two: Ohio is 7th highest of 51 on the local share of school revenue and 45th on the state share — only 6 states put in less. That is the DeRolph holding, stated as a comparison for the first time on this site.

Among the 39 states whose districts levy their own tax rather than being funded by a city or county, Ohio's property tax share of school revenue ranks 5. That comparison excludes twelve states on purpose: where districts are dependent agencies the survey attributes the tax to the parent government, so Massachusetts and Virginia report zero school property tax while raising billions from it. Ranking all fifty-one would put two of the most property-tax-dependent states at the bottom.

FY2022 is the peak year of federal pandemic relief, so the federal share here is inflated and the state and local shares are correspondingly deflated. That runs against this finding rather than for it — in an ordinary year Ohio's local share would be higher. It is also why the 13.9% federal share of revenue on this row is not the 4.2% federal share of operating spending the report card gives for FY2025: different year, different denominator, and the difference between them is the relief cliff.