$14,943 per member: Wisconsin school districts’ current education costs in fiscal 2024–25, district by district

Current education costs per member in 363 Wisconsin school districts, fiscal 2024–25: median $14,943, range $11,135 to $29,252. Every figure from DPI public records, with what the figure includes and leaves out.

Half of the 363 Wisconsin school districts that run both elementary and high school grades recorded current education costs of more than $14,943 per member for fiscal 2024–25, and half recorded less. That middle figure, the median, comes from the Comparative Cost per Member report published by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). It is the most recent year DistrictFacts publishes for the state.

The lowest figure among those districts is $11,135 per member, at Chetek-Weyerhaeuser Area School District (892 students enrolled, 2025–26). The highest is $29,252, at Phelps School District (89 students enrolled, 2025–26), about 2.6 times the lowest. The middle half of districts fall between $13,853 and $16,289.

Cost per member, fiscal 2024–25: the 5 lowest and the 5 highest of 363 Wisconsin districts

Chetek-Weyerhaeuser Area School District: $11,135
Menomonie Area School District: $11,869
Hortonville Area School District: $11,964
Fall Creek School District: $12,022
Neenah Joint School District: $12,089
Mercer School District: $27,560
Gibraltar Area School District: $28,502
Goodman-Armstrong Creek School District: $28,753
Washington Island School District: $29,075
Phelps School District: $29,252

10 of 363 districts shown: the 5 lowest and the 5 highest. Bars start at zero and the line marks the median of all 363, $14,943. Each bar links to the district’s page.

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), Comparative Cost per Member report, fiscal 2024–25

The largest district

Milwaukee School District is the largest Wisconsin system reporting this figure, with 63,943 students enrolled (2025–26). Its figure is $18,533 per member for fiscal 2024–25, 24% above the $14,943 median of the 363 districts compared here. The DistrictFacts homepage compares the same figure with a wider group: all 420 Wisconsin systems reporting it for the year, including the kinds of district left out here. That median is $14,960, and Milwaukee School District is 24% above it.

What “cost per member” means in Wisconsin

In Wisconsin the figure is DPI’s total current education cost per member: a district’s general and special-project fund spending divided by its aid membership. Aid membership is the count of resident pupils used for state aid. It adds summer-school full-time equivalents and pupils in the private school choice, special needs scholarship and independent charter programs, and it leaves out non-resident open-enrollment pupils, so it is not the district’s enrollment. Transportation, facility acquisition, transfers between funds and the revenue a district receives for teaching non-resident pupils are subtracted before the division.

Each state defines this figure differently: what spending is counted, and which count of students it is divided by. The Wisconsin 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 446 Wisconsin districts and other local education agencies. 420 of them report this figure for fiscal 2024–25. The median and the range above cover 363: regular school districts whose schools span both elementary and high school grades. The other 57 are left out so that different kinds of district are not mixed in one median:

43: districts whose schools all end before grade 9
10: districts whose schools all start at grade 6 or later
4: districts that enroll many students who live in other districts, for example in an online school open to the whole state: each enrolled more than one and a half times as many students that year as the count of its own resident pupils that the figure is divided by, so its figure turns on how the state accounts for the students from elsewhere

The remaining 26 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 Comparative Cost per Member report of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), 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

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), Comparative Cost per Member report, fiscal 2024–25: https://dpi.wi.gov/media/55267/download
Enrollment (DPI), 2025–26: shown with its source on each district page.
District type: National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data directory. Grades served: the school list on each district page.