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The figure that decides whether a year works is not your tuition bill. It is cost of attendance: a fourteen-part number your school sets and is required by law to publish, covering food, housing, transport, course materials and even your loan fees. Plan against that, and read below for where the published figures are.
Last updated 1 October 2026
Educational planning worksheet only, not financial advice. This page does arithmetic on figures you type and treats every one of them as a recurring monthly amount. Federal aid does not arrive monthly, and nothing here can see your cost of attendance, your award letter, your lease or your academic calendar. The federal rules explained below carry their statutory and regulatory citations so you can check them; the numbers you enter are your own. Confirm anything that matters with your school's financial aid office.
Federal law defines a term for what a year of college costs, and it is not what your school charges you. It is cost of attendance, set out at 20 U.S.C. 1087ll, and it has fourteen components. Tuition and fees are the first one. The other thirteen are allowances for things that never appear on an invoice, which is exactly why students who cover the bill still run out of money in October.
The statute opens: “For the purpose of this subchapter, the term ‘cost of attendance’ means— (1) tuition and fees normally assessed a student carrying the same academic workload as determined by the institution”. Then it keeps going, and the phrase “as determined by the institution” recurs in component after component. These are your own school's published figures. They are not national averages and not estimates made here.
What the statute puts inside cost of attendance
Several of those are worth reading twice, because students routinely do not know they are claimable.
The books allowance includes a computer. Component (a)(2) is “an allowance for books, course materials, supplies, and equipment, which shall include all such costs required of all such students in the same course of study, including a reasonable allowance for the documented rental or upfront purchase of a personal computer”. Documented is the operative word: keep the receipt.
Transport covers getting to work, not just to class. Component (a)(3) is an allowance “which may include transportation between campus, residences, and place of work”.
The food allowance has a defined standard. Component (a)(5) requires an allowance that, whether you are on a meal plan or buying your own food, “provides the equivalent of three meals each day”. If your own food budget is well under your school's published allowance, you have found genuine slack. If it is well over, you have found the reason the year is tight.
Dependent care is a real component with a real test. Component (a)(9) allows the estimated actual expenses for dependent care, capped at “the reasonable cost in the community”, and the period it covers “includes, but is not limited to, class-time, study-time, field work, internships, and commuting time”. Students with children frequently budget childcare as a personal cost and never mention it to the aid office.
Online study cannot be penalized. Component (a)(11) says that for a student receiving instruction by telecommunications technology, “no distinction shall be made with respect to the mode of instruction in determining costs”.
And your loan fees are in there. Component (a)(13) includes “an allowance for the actual cost of any loan fee, origination fee, or insurance premium charged to such student or the parent of such student on such loan”. The fee the government removes from your loan before it reaches you is itself a recognized cost of going.
There are two different numbers and they get confused constantly. The bill is what your school charges: tuition, fees, and on-campus housing and meals if you have them. The cost is what the year costs you, which is the fourteen components above. Aid is awarded against the cost.
So a package that exactly covers your bill has not left you even. It has left you with nine months of food, transport, course materials and personal expenses to fund, all of which the aid formula already counted on your behalf. The grant did not forget them. You did.
This is not an interpretation. The federal regulations do the subtraction the same way. 34 CFR 685.203(j)(1) caps any Direct Loan at “the student's estimated cost of attendance for the period of enrollment for which the loan is intended”, less “The student's other financial assistance for that period”, and for a subsidized loan less your expected family contribution as well. Cost of attendance minus aid is the quantity the system is built around, and it is the quantity you should be budgeting.
One terminology note, because both words are live. The 2026-27 Pell Grant letter from Federal Student Aid uses Student Aid Index, the measure the FAFSA now produces. The Direct Loan regulation quoted just above still says expected family contribution. Both appear in current federal sources and they occupy the same slot in the formula: the figure subtracted to decide what you need. If one document says SAI and another says EFC, they are not describing different things.
This is the most useful sentence on the page, so it gets its own heading. You do not have to estimate your food, housing, books, transport or personal allowance. Your school is required to publish each of them. 20 U.S.C. 1087ll(c):
“Each institution shall make publicly available on the institution's website a list of all the elements of cost of attendance described in paragraphs (1) through (14) of subsection (a), and shall disclose such elements on any portion of the website describing tuition and fees of the institution.”
Component by component, as dollar figures, on the same part of the site as the tuition page. Find that list, and fill the fields above from it instead of from memory. Then adjust: if your actual rent is $820 and the school's off-campus housing allowance is $650, you have just discovered a $170 monthly gap that no amount of careful grocery shopping closes, and you have discovered it in July rather than in November.
The housing allowance depends on where you live, and the statute sets a different standard for each case: a standard based on the average or median charge for students in institutional housing, a standard rent allowance for students living off campus, a food-only allowance for students in military housing, and for a dependent student living at home with parents, “a standard allowance that shall not be zero”. That last clause is worth knowing. Living at home reduces your cost of attendance. It does not zero out the housing line, and since cost of attendance is the ceiling on borrowing, a zero would have cut your borrowing room as well as your costs.
If you are enrolled less than half-time, the living allowance works differently again. Components (a)(4) and (a)(5) are written for a student attending “on at least a half-time basis”, and subsection (b) lets an institution include a living allowance for a less-than-half-time student “for up to three semesters, or the equivalent, with no more than two semesters being consecutive”. Part-time students who assume the same allowances apply are usually wrong, in the expensive direction.
The calculator above has one income field, and it means “per month”. Federal aid does not work per month, and the mismatch is mechanical rather than a matter of discipline. Four regulatory timings decide when money is actually in your hands.
When the money moves
In the regulations: the earliest a school may disburse is “10 days before the first day of classes of a payment period” (34 CFR 668.164(i)(1)(i)). A credit balance “occurs whenever the amount of title IV, HEA program funds credited to a student's ledger account for a payment period exceeds the amount assessed the student for allowable charges”, and once it does, it “must be paid directly to the student or parent as soon as possible, but no later than” fourteen days (668.164(h)(1) and (h)(2)). If you would have a credit balance, the school must provide a way for you to obtain books and supplies “by the seventh day of a payment period” (668.164(m)(1)), and you may opt out of whatever mechanism it offers.
The fourth one is the one that ruins first semesters. 34 CFR 685.303(b)(5)(i): a student in the first year of an undergraduate program who has not previously received a Direct or Stafford loan cannot be paid loan proceeds “until 30 days after the first day of the student's program of study”, unless the school qualifies for an exemption on cohort default rate grounds. If you are a first-time borrower, plan on the assumption that your loan money shows up a month into term, and find out from your aid office whether your school is exempt.
So the realistic shape is: one deposit per term, arriving somewhere between ten days before classes and a month after they start, which then has to last until the next one.
Turning a term deposit into the monthly figure this planner wants
Step three is where people go wrong. A semester from mid-August to late December is roughly four and a half months, not six. Dividing a nine-month award by twelve produces a comfortable-looking monthly figure and a summer with no money in it, which is the single most common failure in a student budget. If your plan has to cover the summer, the summer needs its own funding, and year-round Pell is the usual answer to that.
For 2026-27 the Pell Grant figures are published and fixed. The maximum scheduled award is $7,395 and the minimum is $740, for an award year running 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027. Eligibility turns on the Student Aid Index: above $14,790, a student is ineligible for Pell.
Two relationships in those numbers are exact, and worth noticing because they tell you the figures are formula-driven rather than negotiated. The ineligibility threshold of $14,790 is precisely twice the $7,395 maximum. And one tenth of the maximum is $739.50, which is the published $740 minimum to the nearest dollar.
Pell is also the mechanism that can fund a summer. A student “may be eligible to receive Pell Grant funds for up to 150% of the student's Pell Grant scheduled award for an award year”, which on the maximum award comes to $11,092.50 rather than $7,395. That extra half-award is how a third term in one year gets paid for, and it is conditional on enrollment, so it is a question for your aid office rather than an assumption.
Here is a term's cash built entirely from published federal figures, for a first-year dependent undergraduate receiving the Pell maximum and borrowing the first-year Direct Loan maximum:
One semester of federal aid · 2026-27 figures · before the school takes its charges
That $6,418.44 is not your spending money. Tuition, fees, and on-campus housing and meals if you have them come out of it first, and only the remainder becomes a credit balance paid to you inside fourteen days. Whether $6,418.44 is generous or nowhere near depends entirely on one number this page cannot see: the cost of attendance your own school publishes. Which is why the section above matters more than this arithmetic does.
The $58.12 is worked from the 1.057% fee with the truncate-not-round rule the Department applies, across two disbursements. The reasoning is set out on the Student Loan Interest Calculator, which also covers why the interest you owe is calculated on $5,500 rather than on the $5,441.88 that arrives.
Books are not a monthly expense. The planner has a monthly books field and it will quietly mislead you, because course materials are bought in a cluster at the start of a term. The regulation's own books provision is keyed to the seventh day of the payment period for exactly that reason. Either put the full term figure in one month and accept that the month looks terrible, or hold it out of the monthly plan entirely and track it as a term cost.
The expense ratio is only meaningful once income is monthly. The tool divides your expenses by the income you typed. Enter a term's deposit as though it were a monthly wage and the ratio will look wonderful while the term quietly runs out.
The loan you were offered is bigger than the loan you receive. $5,500 offered is $5,441.88 delivered, before the school takes anything. Budget the arriving figure.
A surplus is not a surplus until the term is over. A positive leftover in month one of a term-funded budget is simply money that the later months have not spent yet. The planner says “surplus” because it is comparing one month's figures, and it has no way of knowing another deposit is four months away.
Work income has deductions. If part of your income is a campus job, what lands in your account is after withholding, and that is the number that belongs in the income field.
It does not know your cost of attendance. It cannot, and that figure is the one that determines everything else. Only your school publishes it, and the law says it must.
It does not know your aid offer. It has no view of your Pell award, your Student Aid Index, your loan eligibility, any institutional or state grant, or your school's packaging policy. It does not know whether you count as dependent or independent, which changes both your aid and your borrowing limits considerably.
It treats every figure as monthly. There is no term calendar inside it, no disbursement schedule, and no concept of a lump sum. The conversion from one to the other is yours to do, by the four steps above.
It does not model taxes, work-study rules or benefits. Nothing here calculates withholding on a campus job, the limits on Federal Work-Study earnings, or how other benefits interact with aid.
It does not know what is refundable. Lease terms, meal plan contracts, course fees and housing deposits each have their own rules about what you get back and when, and none of those rules is in here.
It saves nothing and sends nothing. There is no account, no bank connection and no storage. Close the tab and the figures are gone, which is also why you should keep your own copy.
It is not advice. It is a worksheet with its federal sources named, so that the parts which are law can be checked against the law.
Every federal figure on this page was read against the sources above on 1 October 2026, and the arithmetic was worked independently of them. Nothing you type leaves your browser. More: the rest of the MyCampusKit tools, including the Student Loan Interest Calculator for the borrowing side of the same question.
Cost of attendance is a term defined in federal law, at 20 U.S.C. 1087ll, and it has fourteen components. Tuition and fees are only the first. The rest are allowances your school sets for things nobody invoices you for: books, course materials, supplies and equipment including a personal computer; transportation; miscellaneous personal expenses; and living expenses covering food and housing. The phrase “as determined by the institution” appears throughout, because these are your school's published figures, not national averages.
Because aid is awarded against the whole cost of the year, not against the bill. If a grant and a loan together cover your tuition exactly, you have not broken even: you still have to eat, get to campus and buy course materials for the next nine months, and the aid formula already counted those. Federal regulation does the subtraction the same way. A Direct Loan may not exceed your estimated cost of attendance less your other financial assistance, so cost of attendance minus aid is the figure the system itself works from.
Your school is required by law to publish them. 20 U.S.C. 1087ll(c): “Each institution shall make publicly available on the institution's website a list of all the elements of cost of attendance described in paragraphs (1) through (14) of subsection (a), and shall disclose such elements on any portion of the website describing tuition and fees of the institution.” So the dollar allowance your school uses for food, housing, books, transport and personal expenses is published, per component, next to its tuition page. Use those numbers to start this planner rather than inventing them.
Not monthly, and often later than you expect. The earliest a school may disburse federal aid is 10 days before the first day of classes of a payment period. Once the aid credited to your account exceeds what the school charged you, the leftover is a credit balance, and it “must be paid directly to the student or parent as soon as possible, but no later than” 14 days after it arose. If you would have a credit balance, the school must also give you a way to get books and supplies by the seventh day of the payment period. One trap for new borrowers: a first-year student who has never borrowed before generally cannot be paid loan proceeds until 30 days after the first day of their program.
Take the credit balance the school actually pays you, subtract anything you owe outside the school such as off-campus rent for the whole term, and divide what is left by the number of months the payment period really covers, read off the academic calendar rather than assumed. A semester running from mid-August to late December is about four and a half months, not six. Dividing a nine-month disbursement by twelve is the single most common way a student budget runs dry in July.
The maximum scheduled award for the 2026-27 award year, which runs 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027, is $7,395. The minimum is $740. A Student Aid Index above $14,790 makes a student ineligible, and that threshold is exactly twice the maximum award. Pell can also stretch across a summer term: a student “may be eligible to receive Pell Grant funds for up to 150% of the student's Pell Grant scheduled award for an award year”, which on the maximum comes to $11,092.50.
No, and the statute is explicit about it. For a dependent student living at home with parents, 20 U.S.C. 1087ll(a)(5)(F) requires “a standard allowance that shall not be zero determined by the institution”. Living at home lowers your cost of attendance relative to a student in a dorm, but it does not zero out the housing component, and that matters because cost of attendance is the ceiling on what you may borrow and the base your aid is packaged against.
No. Nothing you type leaves your browser, nothing is stored, and nothing is transmitted. It is a worksheet that does arithmetic on the figures you enter, and it treats every figure as a recurring monthly amount. It knows nothing about your aid offer, your lease, your meal plan or your academic calendar.
No. This page is educational. It explains how federal cost of attendance and aid disbursement work, with the statutes and regulations cited so you can check them, and it does the arithmetic you ask it to. It cannot see your award letter. Confirm every figure with your school's financial aid office.