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Ohio · where school money goes
How much of it goes to teaching?
Over half your property tax bill goes to schools. In FY25 the 606 districts1 the state reports on, all but five of Ohio’s 611, spent $25.1 billion running themselves, which is $17,609 a pupil. The state sorts that into five categories, and the one it calls instruction — classroom teaching and its direct support — is 57% of it.
Now yours
This page is all of Ohio: the 606 districts1 in the state’s report, added together. Your own county collects its own money and your own district spends it, and each has its own page with these same figures on it — plus, for a district, every school levy still on its bill and the year each was first approved.
All 606 districts in the state’s report, by the county each is filed under.
Not sure which district you are in? It is on your tax bill, and the county map lists every district serving each county with the share of that county’s homes it covers.
The five things a district spends money on
These are the state’s categories, not ours, and they add to the total to the dollar. FY25, every district in Ohio, added up: every dollar over every pupil.
- Teaching 57%
- Administration 13%
- Running buildings 10%
- Pupil support 7%
- Buses 5%
- Staff support 4%
- School meals 4%
Per pupil: Teaching $9,997 · Administration $2,328 · Running buildings $1,824 · Pupil support $1,281 · Buses $937 · Staff support $622 · School meals $619.
What each of these actually means
Teaching is the state’s instruction category: teachers, aides, textbooks, the things that happen in a room with children in it. Running buildings is upkeep: heating, electricity, insurance, cleaning, repairs and security. Buses is running, servicing and maintaining them, and School meals is the cafeteria — the state counts the three as one category, and its expanded spending list splits it. None of it is building schools: new buildings and the loans that pay for them are outside day-to-day spending altogether. Administration is the board of education, the superintendent’s office, the treasurer and business manager, and the central office’s planning and data work — and every building principal’s office, which is the first thing a school board will point out and it is correct. That list is the state’s, from its Expenditure Flow Model handbook. Pupil support is counsellors, nurses, psychologists and attendance. Staff support is training and curriculum work.
78% of the total is salaries and benefits, whichever category it sits in. That is the honest answer to “where does it all go”: it goes to people. What it does not tell you is which people, because the state counts a superintendent’s salary and a first-year teacher’s in the same line — which is why the next two sections count heads instead.
Has the share going to teaching changed?
The instruction share, every year we hold, statewide. It is drawn as three separate lines and the gaps are deliberate: the department re-cut these categories in FY2013 and changed what counts as a pupil in FY2022, so a single line across either break would draw a change of definition as a change in schools.
Share of spending that goes to teaching
Ohio District Profile Reports, every district, every dollar over every pupil. Each segment is one set of the department’s definitions; the years between two segments are the same years, counted differently.
- FY22–FY2556.77%
- FY13–FY2159.45%
- FY10–FY1255.19%
Within the current definitions the share has been falling: 58.1% in FY22 to 56.8% in FY25, while spending per pupil rose from $16,012 in FY23, the first year the state divided spending by enrolled pupils, to $17,609. Both are true at once: more money per child, and a slightly smaller slice of it going to teaching.
Who a district pays
The state counts teachers on its report cards and administrators in the profile report, and both are keyed by the same district number, so they can be put in one table. FY25, full-time equivalents:
| Who activate to sort by Who | FTE activate to sort by FTE | Share of those counted activate to sort by Share of those counted | Pupils each activate to sort by Pupils each |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teachers | 100,544 | 80% | 14 |
| Administrators | 12,798 | 10% | 111 |
| Counsellors | 3,866 | 3.1% | 368 |
| Speech-language pathologists | 2,100 | 1.7% | 678 |
| Nurses | 1,915 | 1.5% | 743 |
| Psychologists | 1,713 | 1.4% | 831 |
| Physical and occupational therapists | 1,000 | 0.8% | 1,424 |
| Social workers | 708 | 0.6% | 2,009 |
| Librarians | 449 | 0.4% | 3,169 |
| Interpreters | 207 | 0.2% | 6,868 |
| Audiologists | 18 | 0.0% | 77,764 |
Swipe sideways for more columns.
Read this one carefully
That share column says of those counted, and it has to. Ohio publishes no total headcount for a school district. Bus drivers, custodians, cooks, secretaries, technology staff and everyone else in a building appear in no count the state keeps — only in the buildings-and-buses dollars above. So the honest statement is that of the 125,318 people the state does count, 80% are teachers. Anyone who tells you what share of all school employees teach is using a number that does not exist.
And administrator is the state’s own closed list of 12 position codes: superintendents; assistant, deputy and associate superintendents; treasurers; principals; assistant principals; directors; coordinators; supervisors and managers; central-office specialists, which is where a business manager sits; administrative assistants to an executive officer; community school administrators; and other officials. The FY2025 District Profile Report names the codes and the state’s EMIS position-code manual defines each one.
Principals are on it, and no teaching time is. The state counts assignments rather than people, so someone who teaches part of the day and coordinates a program for the rest is counted in each, for the share of their time. Two groups are left out. Secretaries and clerks are a separate series in the state’s coding, so the count is not padded with office staff; and building managers and deans of students are administrative codes the state does not include, so if anything the count is low.
The average administrator was paid $98,141 and the average teacher $76,145, both the state’s figures for FY25.
Ohio has 611 school districts
The state’s FY2025 District Profile Report, which every figure on this page comes from, covers 606 of them. It leaves out five of Ohio’s smallest, the island districts and College Corner Local, “due to the unique characteristics of these school districts”: Kelleys Island Local in Erie County; Middle Bass Local, North Bass Local and Put-in-Bay Local in Ottawa County; and College Corner Local in Preble County. The state counts 207 pupils between them in 2023-24, in Ohio’s Education Landscape. So what follows is the 606, and if anything it understates how many very small districts Ohio runs: all five would sit in the smallest band below.
Of those 606, half have fewer than 1,429 pupils, and the 41 smallest hold 17,095 children between them — 1.2% of all the pupils in the report. A district of any size needs a superintendent, a treasurer and a board, so the smaller it is the more of its budget those cost per child. That is not an opinion about whether it should be so; it is what the state’s own columns say when you group them by size.
| Pupils in the district | Districts | Spend per pupil | To administration | Pupils per administrator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 500 | 41 | $19,767 | 15.9% | 66 |
| 500–1,000 | 155 | $17,547 | 14.3% | 88 |
| 1,000–2,500 | 259 | $16,541 | 13.5% | 109 |
| 2,500–10,000 | 137 | $16,865 | 12.5% | 125 |
| Over 10,000 | 14 | $20,573 | 13.5% | 107 |
| All 606 | 606 | $17,609 | 13.2% | 111 |
Swipe sideways for more columns.
FY25. How many children are in each band: under 500 17,095 · 500–1,000 117,981 · 1,000–2,500 406,933 · 2,500–10,000 594,885 · over 10,000 286,185. The bands are round numbers chosen before the figures were looked at, so that nobody has to wonder whether the cut was picked to make the table say something. Every column is the state’s own, added up: all dollars over all pupils in the band.
Every district has its own page, with its levies and the year each of them was first approved: pick your county and its districts are listed there.
Read the column, not the headline
The pattern in that last column is real and it is not a straight line. Administration’s share falls steadily as districts get bigger — from 15.9% in the smallest band to 12.5% — and then rises again in the largest districts, which are Ohio’s big-city systems and are not expensive for the same reason a village district is. Cost per pupil does the same thing: highest at both ends. Anyone quoting only one end of this table is quoting half of it.
What this table does not say
It does not say what merging districts would save. Nobody can say that from this data, and any number you see for it is a model rather than a measurement — the cost of a merger, the salaries that would actually end, and what happens to the buildings are all assumptions. What the table does say is what the smallest districts cost per child today, in the state’s own figures, next to what the largest ones do.
Why this is smaller than the number you may have seen
Ohio’s property tax is usually quoted whole, at around $24 billion a year. The figure on this page is $15.6 billion, and both are right: they count different things. Two steps separate them, and both come from the state’s own numbers.
| What is being counted | A year |
|---|---|
| Homes and farms, after the state’s credits | $15.6B |
| … and business, industrial and utility property | $22.1B |
| … and the credits the state pays for you | $24.1B |
Swipe sideways for more columns.
Where those two steps come from
Business property. This site holds certified rates for homes and farms and none for anything else, so nothing on it ever claims to be everyone’s bill. But the state’s District Profile Report publishes both rates for every school district, and applying each to its own share of the district’s value turns $8.90 billion of school tax on homes and farms into $12.64 billion on everything — a multiplier of 1.42. The report’s own all-property column, arrived at another way, says $13.19 billion.
The credits. The 10% and 2.5% rollbacks and the homestead exemption are paid by the state to the school, township or county, on your behalf. They are collected without ever appearing on your payment. Schools receive $1.21 billion of them and are 60% of the bill, so everyone else’s together is about $2.0 billion.
Fiscal 2025. The first line is the measured one — certified taxable value times certified rate, district by district, which reconciles to the state’s own county totals within about one percent. The two below it are built from the state’s school figures and scaled, so treat them as this site’s arithmetic rather than as a published total. And charged is not collected: what goes unpaid is billions a year on its own.
Where these numbers come from, and what would break them
Two files, both published by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, both free to download and check.
The District Profile Report — the “Cupp report” — is one workbook a year, one row per district. It carries the spending split, the administrator count and the revenue sources. We hold FY10 to FY25, 16 years. The district educator file behind the School Report Cards carries the teacher count and the named support roles, one workbook a report-card year. Both are keyed by the state’s own district number, so they join exactly and nothing here depends on matching a district by its name.
Two definitions come from the department’s manuals rather than from either file. Who counts as an administrator is the FY2025 District Profile Report’s list of position codes, each defined in the EMIS position-code manual. What counts as administration spending is set out in the Expenditure Flow Model handbook.
The four things we will not do with them
We do not use the report’s own statewide row. It is not one calculation: in some years it is the simple average of the districts in it and in others it is every dollar over every pupil, and on state revenue in FY2023 those differ by 14%. Everything on this page is the second one, computed the same way in every year — which in FY2024 and FY2025 comes to the state’s own published figure to the cent.
We do not draw a line across a definition change. In FY2013 the department opened a fourth revenue category and moved about half of pupil support into instruction and administration; in FY2022 it switched from total to enrolled pupils and took the career centre out of the millage. Enrolment appears to fall 12% in FY2022 and did not. Each row we hold records which definitions it was published under, so a chart stops at the seam instead of drawing through it.
We do not quietly fix a bad year. FY2014’s revenue columns sit about 13% below both FY2013 and FY2015 in every district and every source, while its spending columns run smooth. That is a workbook, not a recession. It is loaded exactly as published and flagged, so it can be seen rather than smoothed away.
We do not mix in the federal count. The National Center for Education Statistics counts teachers too, and for 2022-23 its number for these districts is 14% lower than the state’s. Same year, same districts, different definition. The state’s figure is the one a school board has, so it is the one here, and the two are never put side by side.
This is an estimate built from public records — not tax, legal or financial advice, and not an appraisal. Only your county’s own statement is authoritative about your bill. If you’re thinking of challenging your value, confirm the details with your county’s Board of Revision or a property-tax professional. The full terms.