Every dollar the state sends, and where it starts

Ohio's schools are paid for from two directions: the state, and the local property tax. This page is the state's side — the money that arrives in a district's budget from Columbus. Here is FY27, biggest source first.

• State general fund 73.4%
• Ohio Lottery 11.5%
• Property-tax reimbursement 9.3%
• Other state funding 5.5%
• Business-property replacement 0.3%

State general fund — Income tax and sales tax, $10,335 million. Ohio Lottery — Lottery Profits Education Fund, $1,627 million. Property-tax reimbursement — Reimbursing districts for credits taken off local bills, $1,313 million. Other state funding — Outside the general fund line, $771 million. Business-property replacement — Winding down since the tangible personal property tax ended, $43 million.

The general fund is the answer to the page's question, and it is not a close one: nearly three-quarters of the state's school money is ordinary income tax and sales tax. The lottery is real money and it is the fourth-largest source of anything on this list — but it was never designed to carry a school system, and it does not.

What has actually changed since FY09

Each source as its share of the state's total, so five things of very different sizes can be read on one axis. The general fund line sits alone near the top, and the distance between it and everything else is the shape of the answer above.

The lottery's share has gone up, not down

It was 7.5% of the state's total in FY09 and is 11.5% now. The argument that the lottery was supposed to replace the property tax is not answered by the lottery shrinking — it is answered by the size it has always been.

The line nobody talks about

Follow the bottom line down. Business-property replacement was $1.13 billion in FY11 — about 12% of the state's school money — when the state was covering what districts lost as Ohio phased out the tax on business equipment and inventory. By FY27 it is $43 million, down 96%. That money did not come back as business property tax, and it is one of the reasons homes now carry a larger share of Ohio's taxable value than they used to.

Has state funding for schools actually gone up?

In cash, yes, and by a lot: from $9.47 billion in FY09 to $13.51 billion in FY25 — up 43%.

Put both years in the same money, and the answer changes sign. That FY25 figure is $9.13 billion in FY09 dollars — about 4% lower than where it started. It has been under its FY09 level in every year since FY11.

Two things this does not say. It is the total, not per pupil, and Ohio's enrolment has changed over the same period — we do not hold enrolment, so we do not divide by it. And it is deflated by CPI-U, general consumer prices, which is the standard way to compare dollars across years but is not a price index for what schools actually buy, most of which is salaries and health cover. Both would move the number; neither turns a fall into a rise.

What “property-tax reimbursement” actually is

Property-tax reimbursement — $1.3 billion, about 9% of the state's total — is the easiest line here to misread, so it is worth being exact about.

It is not the property tax homeowners pay their schools. It is the discount. Ohio knocks 10% off non-business property tax bills, another 2.5% off owner-occupied homes, and more again for older and disabled owners through the homestead exemption. Your county bills you the reduced amount; the state then pays the district the difference, so the school does not lose the money you were excused. That payment is this line.

Which makes it small next to the real thing. The credits cut a typical Ohio school bill by about 12.5%, so what homeowners send their districts directly, on the bills this site estimates, is several times this figure. It does not appear on this page at all — this page is the state's side.

It is also the reason this line barely moves while everything else grows: its share has fallen from 10.0% to 9.3% since FY09. Since 2013, levies passed at or after that November's election do not carry the 10% and 2.5% credits at all, so the reimbursement is pinned to the levies that already existed — while HB 920 holds what those levies collect roughly flat. Two rules, one flat line.

It is worth holding next to the other half of the argument. Schools take 59.9% of a typical Ohio homeowner's bill — the biggest single piece by a distance — so a district's money arrives from Columbus and from your own bill at the same time, and a change to either one lands on the same budget. That is why the school-funding argument and the property-tax argument are really one argument.

This page is the state's side only. We do not publish a state-versus-local ratio: working the local half out of what we hold would mean multiplying residential rates by residential values and calling the answer school funding, which it is not. Source: the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce's Overview of School Funding, fiscal years 2009–2027; every total is the state's own.