PendingTreasury has not published final regulations under §25F. Some parts of this site are deliberately unfinished until it does, including federal donor identification numbers and IRS reporting.
Direct your federal scholarship tax credit to education.
Starting in 2027 you can send up to a set amount to a scholarship organization and take it off your federal tax bill dollar for dollar. Pick who gets it. We keep the paperwork straight.
The §25F credit is nonrefundable. It can reduce your federal income tax to zero but will not generate a refund. Your actual benefit depends on your tax liability.
Public domain (CC0)
Your money doesn’t stop here
Stripe moves it straight to the organization you picked. It never lands in an SGO Direct account, and your card statement shows their name, not ours.
No Social Security number
Treasury has signalled that donors will get an IRS-issued number for this instead. We built with no field to put an SSN in.
You can check our work
Every listing says where it came from, how it was checked, and when. Where we haven’t verified something, it says that too.
One ceiling, any number of gifts
You can split it across as many organizations as you like
The limit is annual and it is yours, not the organization’s. Give once or give six times. What matters is the running total against $1,700.
Example only. Not a real position.
Plain english
What the Education Freedom Tax Credit is
Congress created it in 2025. Most people writing about it call it the Education Freedom Tax Credit, or EFTC. The IRS calls it the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit. Tax people call it §25F, after the section of the code it lives in. Same thing, three names.
Give cash to an approved scholarship organization and you take that amount straight off your federal tax bill, up to $1,700 a year.
The word doing the work there is credit. A deduction shrinks the income you get taxed on. A credit comes off the tax itself. Give $1,700 and, if you owe at least that much, your bill drops by the same $1,700.
The catch is the word nonrefundable. It can take what you owe down to zero and no further. If your federal bill for the year is smaller than what you gave, the leftover credit does not come back to you as a refund, though you can carry it forward for up to 5 years.
- An SGO
- A Scholarship Granting Organization. A nonprofit that hands out K-12 scholarships. To count for §25F it has to spend at least 90% of its income on scholarships and serve at least ten students who are not all at one school.
- When it starts
- Gifts made on or after January 1, 2027. You claim them on the 2027 return you file in 2028.
- Your state has to be in
- States opt in one by one and then file a list of their organizations with the IRS. If yours has not opted in, gifts to organizations there do not qualify.
- Cash only
- Not stock, not property, not your time.
- One benefit per gift
- You cannot take the credit and also deduct the same gift as charity. If you claim a state credit on it too, that reduces the federal one.
This is a description of the law, not advice about your situation. What you actually get depends on what you owe and how you file.