By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Four minutes
It’s truly the most wonderful time of the year. Yes, that’s right: The National College Attainment Network's (NCAN's) FAFSA Tracker is back and ready to document high school seniors’ Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) completions as the United States aims for a record number of
high school seniors completing the form.
Coming on the heels of a nearly 18% bounceback from the class of 2025, the class of 2026 is enjoying an
opening before October 1 and a substantially simplified process that has NCAN members reporting students they help with the financial aid process are completing their applications in about 15 minutes.
There have already been more than a million FAFSAs completed by the high school class of 2026! FAFSA completions from class of 2026 seniors are currently up 11.7% nationwide through November 21. This is compared to the high school
class of 2023, which was the last class with an October 1 FAFSA opening.
This data comes from NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker, which returns for its ninth year of visualizing FAFSA data at the national, state, and local levels. The Tracker uses the Federal Student Aid Data Center’s high school-level data on submissions and completions, which is updated each Friday.
In the early data, Illinois, New Jersey, and Tennessee are the leading by estimated percent of class of 2026 seniors completing a FAFSA. NCAN will monitor states throughout the cycle as they jockey for top honors.
We will also rank states according to their year-over-year growth in the number of FAFSAs completed. Those rankings will become available to states in a couple of weeks once we have same-date comparisons to last cycle.
It’s an important year for the FAFSA. The 54% FAFSA completion rate achieved by class of 2025 by the end of June marked a return to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels of FAFSA completion. The combination of a streamlined and more effective
process, as well as an early FAFSA opening means we are well-positioned to set a record for FAFSA completions by high school seniors!
In addition to eagerly hoping for a record breaking year, NCAN continues to watch states who have implemented universal FAFSA to see how their performance progresses. For the first time since 2020, no state is implementing a universal
FAFSA policy for the first time this year. However, nine states currently have a policy requiring FAFSA completion for high school graduation. (Alabama, California, Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, and Texas.)
NCAN maintains a full suite of FAFSA resources for the field, and we encourage practitioners in all settings to explore to find what’s right for them. Beyond this, we’ve also highlighted some promising statewide
practices to help promote FAFSA completion:
Some notes on the various visualizations in NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker follow below. Have questions or concerns? I’m happy to chat at debaunb@ncan.org.
FAFSA Tracker Notes
At present the FAFSA Tracker offers six tabs, each with a different way of looking at these data:
The Home Page offers national-level data on percent change and percent of seniors completing as well as state-level rankings by these two metrics.
The Completions Lookup Table displays the number of FAFSA completions at the state, Congressional district, county, city, district, or high school level for the high school classes of 2025 and 2026 by most recent date of the current cycle.
If your high school does not appear, try setting district to “Null” and try again. Please email debaunb@ncan.org if you see something amiss, and we will work to fix the district-school connection moving forward.
Note that all private high schools should set district to “Null.”
State Profile includes state-level data on percent change and percent of seniors completing as well as state-level year-over-year change and percent of seniors completing estimates by high school categories (income, percent of students
of color, and geography). This page also includes city, district, and school level year-over-year change.
The US Heat Map displays estimated percent of seniors completing or year-over-year percent change at the state-level.
Line Chart by Cycle harnesses NCAN’s longitudinal data on FAFSA completion and offers line charts on year-over-year percent change and the estimated percent of seniors completing for the high school classes of 2018-2026. This page includes
national charts and a set of state charts that are adjustable by state.
Bar Chart by Cycle allows users to adjust a date slider to see state-level FAFSA completion rates through a given date span across the classes of 2018-2026. This visualization is like Line Chart by Cycle but more customizable.
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