Scholarship Deadline Tracker

The federal deadline is 30 June 2027. Texas wants it by 15 January 2026.

Those two dates are 531 days apart, and both of them are printed on the same federal form. The 2026–27 FAFSA form states the federal deadline plainly: “For federal aid, submit your application as early as possible, but no earlier than October 1, 2025. We must receive your application no later than June 30, 2027.” Two paragraphs later it says something most students never read: “For state or college aid, the deadline may be as early as October 1, 2025, and you may need to complete additional forms.”

So a student can file comfortably inside the federal window, be told their FAFSA was accepted, and have already missed every dollar their state had to give. That is not an edge case. It is the normal failure, and it is the reason a tracker like the one above is worth keeping at all: the date you need to meet is almost never the date the federal government publishes.

Ten entries from the federal state-deadline list, against the federal close

Deadline wording quoted verbatim from the 2026–27 FAFSA form, page 2, read 1 October 2026. Day counts are the interval from the state date to the 30 June 2027 federal deadline, calculated for this page.

Louisiana is the only entry on the whole list whose own deadline falls after the federal one, and even Louisiana tells you not to use it: the published entry reads “July 1, 2027 (Feb. 1, 2026, recommended)”. Everyone else is earlier, most of them by more than a year.

Twelve states spend the money until it runs out

This is the part that makes a calendar insufficient. For twelve of the 59 states and territories on the federal list, the published entry does not describe a deadline at all. It describes a queue. The phrase the Department of Education uses is “Awards made while funds exist”, and South Carolina says it even more directly: its need-based grants are “first come, first served; awards made while funds exist.”

The twelve, counted from the published list on 1 October 2026: Alaska, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Vermont.

Four of them pair that phrase with no deadline at all, only a start date. Kentucky's entire entry is “As soon as possible after Oct. 1, 2025. Awards made while funds exist.” North Dakota's and Vermont's are the same sentence. Illinois tells you to go and look: “Refer to the Illinois Student Assistance Commission's website for the current Monetary Award Program (MAP) deadline dates. As soon as possible after Oct. 1, 2025. Awards made while funds exist.”

For a student in one of those twelve states the useful question is not “when is it due” but “how long has the window been open, and is there anything left”. A date you enter in the tracker above is a guess at best. Put the opening date in instead and treat every day after it as a day of lost ground. If you are reading this page in, say, March, the money in a first-come state has been going out for roughly five months already.

Nineteen entries name no date whatsoever

Of the 59 entries, 19 contain no calendar date: Alabama, American Samoa, Colorado, Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Hawaii, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Palau, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, U.S. Virgin Islands, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Most of them say the same eight words: “Check with your financial aid office.”

Minnesota is the interesting one, because it does publish a rule and the rule is not a date: “State Grant & North Star Promise: By 30th day of term.” That is a deadline you cannot write down until you know your own term calendar, and it moves every year.

What this means for the tracker above is worth saying straight. Roughly a third of students cannot fill in the deadline field from any public federal list. The date has to come from a person at your school. That is one phone call, and it is the single highest-value thing on this page.

Four deadlines, and the fourth one is invisible

Most pages count three deadlines. There are four, and the last one is the one nobody warns you about.

That last row is quoted from the form: “Your college must have your correct, complete information by your last day of enrollment in the 2026–27 school year.” Submitting on time is not the end of the obligation. If something on the form was wrong and the correction lands after you stop being enrolled, the aid can go away after you thought it was settled. A tracker entry for “fix the thing the aid office emailed me about” is as real a deadline as the application itself.

There is also a detail in the fine print that quietly costs people the whole thing. The federal list carries this instruction above the state entries: “Unless otherwise noted, the dates below refer to when the form must be received.” Received, not sent. Two states note the exception explicitly and they note it in opposite directions: California's date is “(date postmarked)” and Florida's is “(date processed)”. Those are three different events on three different days, and only one of them is under your control.

What the money is actually worth, so you can rank the entries

A tracker sorts by date. It cannot sort by value, and value is the other half of the decision when two deadlines fall in the same week. Here are the federal numbers for the award year this page covers, from the Department of Education's own Dear Colleague Letter of 30 January 2026.

Three things follow from those four numbers, and they change how you prioritise the list above.

The spread is a factor of ten. A Pell award is anywhere from $740 to $7,395, which is a wider range than almost any private scholarship you will apply for. The FAFSA entry in your tracker is therefore usually the highest-value line on it, even though it is the one with the latest federal deadline. Latest deadline, largest number: that combination is exactly how it gets left to the end.

There is a hard cut-off, and it is a number, not a judgement. Pell eligibility ends at a Student Aid Index of $14,790 for this award year. Below it there is an award; at or above it there is not. If you are near that line, the accuracy of the figures on your form matters more than the date you file it.

Summer is payable, and most students do not know it. The same letter states that 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”. That is the year-round Pell rule, and 150% of $7,395 is $11,092.50 across the year. It is why a summer term can be funded at all, and it is worth a tracker entry of its own, because the question has to be asked at your aid office rather than answered by a form.

What this tracker does not know, including two things it gets slightly wrong

This is a list and a countdown. It is not connected to anything. The specific limits, including the ones that are defects rather than design:

It does not know any deadline. Every date in it is one you typed. Nothing on this page is checked against the federal list, your state agency or your school, and nothing updates when a state moves a date. Confirm every entry against the official application site before you trust it.

The date it pre-fills is a suggestion, not a deadline. When the page loads it offers a date 30 days ahead, computed in your own time zone. It is a placeholder to be overwritten with the real deadline from the official application site.

It sends nothing and reminds you of nothing. There is no email, no notification and no calendar export. “Days left” only updates when you open the page, so a deadline can pass silently while the tab is closed.

It lives in this browser only. The list is kept in this browser's local storage. A different browser, a different device or a private window shows an empty list, and clearing site data deletes it with no copy anywhere. Anything you would be upset to lose belongs in a calendar as well.

It cannot tell you whether money is left. For the twelve first-come states above, that is the only question that matters, and no tracker can answer it.

Finding your own three dates, in about ten minutes

1. Read your own state's entry on the federal list, which is printed on page 2 of the FAFSA form itself and linked at the bottom of this page. Note whether it gives a date, a start date with “awards made while funds exist”, or nothing but “check with your financial aid office”. Those three answers need three different responses from you.
2. Ask your college's financial aid office for their institutional deadline, in those words. It is not on any federal list, it is frequently the earliest of the four, and it is often a priority date for the college's own money rather than a hard cut-off. Ask also whether they require any additional form, because 25 of the 59 federal entries warn that “More forms may be required”.
3. Ask what happens if you miss it. This is the question that separates a priority date from a deadline, and the answer differs by programme inside one school. Fourteen of the 59 federal entries use the phrase “priority consideration” rather than naming a hard close.
4. Put all three in the tracker above, plus the correction deadline, and put the earliest one in whatever actually wakes you up.

If you are tracking the loan side of this as well, the student loan interest estimator covers what the borrowing costs once the grants are settled, and the college budget planner is where the awards meet the rent.

Sources

• 2026–27 FAFSA form, U.S. Department of Education: the federal submission window (no earlier than 1 October 2025, received no later than 30 June 2027), the warning that state and college deadlines may fall as early as 1 October 2025, the instruction that the state dates refer to when the form must be received, the correction deadline of your last day of enrollment, and the complete state and territory deadline table on page 2 from which every state figure, count and quotation on this page was taken.
• Federal Student Aid, 2026–27 Federal Pell Grant Maximum and Minimum Award Amounts (Dear Colleague Letter, 30 January 2026): the $7,395 maximum and $740 minimum scheduled award, the 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027 award year, the $14,790 Student Aid Index threshold above which Pell is unavailable, and the 150% year-round Pell rule.
• Federal Student Aid, FAFSA deadlines: the Department's own current deadline page, which is where a state entry will be updated if it changes after this page was written.

Every state deadline, phrase and count on this page was read from the 2026–27 FAFSA form on 1 October 2026 and counted from the published table rather than recalled. Nothing you type into the tracker leaves your browser. This page is not a scholarship search engine and not financial advice, and it makes no prediction about what aid any particular reader will receive: eligibility and amounts are decided by the Department of Education, your state agency and your school. More: the rest of the MyCampusKit tools.