Which costs are required, optional, recurring, or one-time?

District of Columbia districts spend a median of $29,262 per student a year against $14,543 nationally. Use this page to compare every school district in one state by spending per student and results, decide how one district's spending and results sit against the rest of its state, preserve each district's figure, the enrollment behind it, and how many of the state's districts the table reaches, and take this next step: find the district in the table, then look up a ZIP code to see which one serves a given street.

What District of Columbia School Districts Spend Per Student

The median District of Columbia school district spends $29,262 per student per year, $14,719 above the national median of $14,543, across all 58 districts the state reports. The 1 of them a ZIP code can reach are listed below, and their 48,635 students account for $1.3 billion of current spending in fiscal year 2022.

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

District of Columbia at a Glance

Median district, per student	$29,262
National median district	$14,543
Districts listed	1 of 58
Students listed	48,635
Median district, math	≈22%
Median district, reading	≈27%

Every District of Columbia 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. 57 further District of Columbia 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.

District of Columbia school districts by enrollment, with spending per student for fiscal year 2022
District	Students	Per student	Math	Reading	Graduation
District of Columbia Public Schools	48,635	$27,425	33%	40%	65%

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 District of Columbia School Spending

How much does the average District of Columbia school district spend per student?

The middle, or median, District of Columbia district spent $29,262 per student in fiscal year 2022, $14,719 above the national median of $14,543. The median is the better summary here: a few very small districts spend several times what a large one does, and an average would follow them. That median covers all 58 districts the state reports. Across the 1 a ZIP code can reach, which are the ones listed on this page, 48,635 students account for $1.3 billion of current spending.

Which District of Columbia districts spend the most and least per student?

District of Columbia Public Schools reports the highest figure in the table at $27,425 per student for 48,635 students, and District of Columbia Public Schools the lowest at $27,425 for 48,635 students. Enrollment is the denominator, so a small district with one building and one bus route honestly produces a high figure; read the two columns together.

Why are some District of Columbia districts missing from this table?

District of Columbia has 58 districts with federal finance data and 1 of them appear here. The rest are placed in no ZIP code by the federal boundary file, which is normal for charter and virtual school districts that have no attendance area, so there is no ZIP code a reader could use to find them.

Does this money follow a child who is homeschooled?

No. The figure is what the district spends on a seat in its own schools, funded from local property tax, state formula aid and federal programs. Withdrawing a child removes the child from the count rather than sending the money home. TheHomeschoolingCompany is $1,788 for one student for a school year by comparison, less for each child after the first.

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.

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