$14,042 per pupil: Georgia school districts’ spending in 2024–25, district by district

Spending per pupil in 179 Georgia school districts, 2024–25: median $14,042, range $9,953 to $27,431. Every figure from GOSA public records, with what the figure includes and leaves out.

Half of the 179 Georgia school districts that run both elementary and high school grades recorded spending of more than $14,042 per pupil for 2024–25, and half recorded less. That middle figure, the median, comes from the Financial Efficiency Star Rating file published by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (GOSA). It is the most recent year DistrictFacts publishes for the state.

The lowest figure among those districts is $9,953 per pupil, at Long County (4,510 students enrolled, 2024–25). The highest is $27,431, at Stewart County (319 students enrolled, 2024–25), about 2.8 times the lowest. The middle half of districts fall between $13,215 and $15,416.

Per-pupil spending, 2024–25: the 5 lowest and the 5 highest of 179 Georgia districts

Long County
$9,953
Jenkins County
$10,664
Grady County
$11,627
Columbia County
$11,644
Calhoun City
$11,809
Talbot County
$24,540
Webster County
$24,865
Taliaferro County
$26,340
Atlanta Public Schools
$26,570
Stewart County
$27,431

10 of 179 districts shown: the 5 lowest and the 5 highest. Bars start at zero and the line marks the median of all 179, $14,042. Each bar links to the district’s page.

Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (GOSA), Financial Efficiency Star Rating file, 2024–25

The largest district

Gwinnett County is the largest Georgia system reporting this figure, with 180,694 students enrolled (2024–25). Its figure is $13,701 per pupil for 2024–25, 2% below the $14,042 median of the 179 districts compared here. The DistrictFacts homepage compares the same figure with a wider group: all 180 Georgia systems reporting it for the year, including the kinds of district left out here. That median is $14,052, and Gwinnett County is 2% below it.

What “per-pupil spending” means in Georgia

In Georgia the figure is the per-pupil expenditure GOSA publishes under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act: the district’s included expenditures, from federal, state and local sources, divided by its full-time enrollment in the same file. GOSA’s file does not list which spending is included. It also prints an amount for each district that it calls excluded expenditures, without saying what that amount contains. Set beside GOSA’s separate revenue and expenditure report for the same year, the included amount is within 5% of the district’s total K-12 spending in that report for 143 of the 179 districts compared here, and the excluded amount is larger than that total for 177 of them. The excluded amount therefore cannot be read as spending left out of the figure. The full-time enrollment used here is not the full-time-equivalent count in GOSA’s revenue and expenditure file.

Each state defines this figure differently: what spending is counted, and which count of students it is divided by. The Georgia figure should not be set beside another state’s, and DistrictFacts does not rank states on it.

Which districts are counted

DistrictFacts publishes pages for 232 Georgia districts and other local education agencies. 180 of them report this figure for 2024–25. The median and the range above cover 179: regular school districts whose schools span both elementary and high school grades. The other one is left out so that different kinds of district are not mixed in one median:

The remaining 52 have no published figure for the year. A missing or withheld figure is not counted as zero; it is left out of the median.

What this does not tell you

A per-pupil figure does not show whether money was spent well, and it is not a measure of school quality. Districts differ in the students they serve, the services they must provide and their size. In a district with few students, a small change in spending or in the pupil count moves the figure a long way. This is one year of data and it says nothing about the trend. A useful question to ask a district is what is included in its figure and how it has changed over time; each district page linked here shows the detail and the source file.

This report was generated from public records by the DistrictFacts Data Desk. Every figure in it is read from the Financial Efficiency Star Rating file of the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (GOSA), as published on the district pages; none was typed by hand. The method is described on the DistrictFacts methodology page, and a correction can be requested from this story.

Sources

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