Does Your State Require Personal Finance to Graduate?

All 50 states and DC | Last verified: 2026-09-17 | How we verify

Requirements by state

30 states guarantee a standalone personal finance course. The rest either require the topic inside another subject or do not require it at all - and where we have not yet confirmed which, the table says so instead of guessing.

Why the two national counts disagree

The two national trackers disagree because they are counting different things, not because either is wrong. CEE counts any state that requires personal finance to graduate, including states where the topic is a unit inside an economics or business course. NGPF counts only states that guarantee a standalone semester-long course. A third difference is timing: a law can be enacted years before the first class is held to it, and the trackers do not treat pending implementation the same way. That is why this dataset records the graduating class each requirement first applies to rather than a single yes or no. Hawai'i is the worked example. CEE counts it among the states that newly mandated personal finance; NGPF does not list it as a guarantee state. Both are right: the requirement is real and starts with the Class of 2030, but a school may satisfy it by folding lessons into existing courses, so no student is guaranteed a standalone course.

How we verify a row, and what we have not checked

Each row is verified against that state's own primary source - the codified statute or the state education agency's requirement page - and cross-checked against two independent national trackers. Where a secondary source disagrees with the primary source, the primary source wins and the discrepancy is recorded in statuteMechanics. Two traps are already recorded in this dataset. First, a bill analysis is not the enacted law: Texas's committee analysis and its enrolled bill give different effective years, and the enrolled text wins. Second, many state education agency sites block non-browser user agents, so a source that looks dead to a script may be perfectly healthy - check with a browser user agent before recording a URL as broken.

• Statute read - we have read that state's own statute or its state education agency page, and the source is linked in the table.
• Trackers agree - two independent national trackers give the same classification, but we have not yet read the underlying law, so the row asserts no credit amount and no effective rule.

20 rows are still marked "not yet verified" for the first affected class or for whether an embedded requirement exists. We would rather show you a gap than a confident wrong answer. Those rows are being worked through, and each carries its own verification date.

Frequently asked questions