What California School Districts Spend Per Student

The median California school district spends $15,134 per student per year, $591 above the national median of $14,543, across all 1,857 districts the state reports. The 902 of them a ZIP code can reach are listed below, and their 5,244,073 students account for $85.7 billion of current spending in fiscal year 2022.

By Andrew Garber, founder of TheHomeschoolingCompany. Reviewed August 12, 2026.

California at a Glance

Every California District, by Enrollment

Spending is current spending divided by fall membership for fiscal year 2022. Proficiency and graduation rates are school year 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic interrupted state testing, so the money and the results are not from the same year. A figure marked ≈ is one the federal file published as a range rather than a value, so small groups of children stay unidentifiable; it is the middle of that range and within ten points of the real one. A dash means the federal files publish no value under that district's ID. 955 further California districts are missing because the federal boundary file places them in no ZIP code, which is normal for charter and virtual districts with no attendance area.

Sources

Spending and enrollment come from the NCES School District Finance Survey (F-33) for fiscal year 2022. Proficiency and graduation rates come from EDFacts for school year 2018-19. Districts are matched to ZIP codes through the NCES EDGE geographic relationship file. Nothing on this page is estimated or modelled: a figure is read from a federal source file or it is left blank.

Questions About California School Spending

Look Up Your Own District

Enter a ZIP code and the calculator returns the district that serves it, what it spends per student, how its students score, and what the same school year costs at home.

Spending Per Student in Other States