New York spends more on its public schools than any state in the country. It is also teaching roughly 12 percent fewer students than it was 15 years ago. Those two facts sitting next to each other are the whole story, and depending on who you ask, they are either proof that New York takes education seriously or proof that the system has lost its ability to tell the difference between investment and inertia.

That tension sits at the center of a report from the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog that has spent years tracking New York's finances against the rest of the country. The report finds that New York and its localities collect more from taxpayers than any other state and spend the third most per capita in the nation, a combination that produces the country's highest average per-pupil spending. What the numbers do not show, at least not yet, is performance to match. To understand how New York got here, and where the money is actually going, it helps to walk through the numbers region by region, year by year.

The Number New Yorkers Keep Arguing About

New York has led the nation in per-pupil spending for nineteen consecutive years. That is not a recent development. In the 2007-08 school year, the state spent $17,173 per student, already the highest total in the country at the time and 67 percent above the national average. By the 2022-23 school year, that figure had climbed to $34,800, or roughly $15,000 more per student than the average American public school received. For the current school year, statewide spending totals an estimated $89 billion across New York's public school districts, or $36,293 per student, a 21 percent increase since the 2020-21 school year alone. Districts are now planning for an even higher figure heading into the 2026-27 school year, with per-pupil spending projected to top $37,000 statewide.

Of that $89 billion, roughly $39 billion flows through the state budget in the form of school aid, with the remainder coming from local property taxes and a smaller share from federal programs. According to USAFacts, based on 2022-23 data, about 51.5 percent of New York school funding came from local sources, 38.6 percent from the state, and 9.9 percent from the federal government, a heavier reliance on local property taxes than most states use to fund their schools.

How New York Stacks Up Against Every Other State

To put New York's spending in context, it helps to look at where the rest of the country lands. The Reason Foundation's most recent K-12 spending analysis found that public schools nationwide received $946.5 billion in funding, with New York topping every state at $36,976 per student. New Jersey was a distant second at $30,267 per student, followed by Vermont ($29,169), Connecticut ($28,975), Pennsylvania ($26,242), California ($25,941), Rhode Island ($25,709) and Hawaii ($25,485). Only eight states in the entire country crossed the $25,000-per-student threshold. The national average, meanwhile, sat at roughly $20,322 per student after adjusting for inflation, which means New York spends nearly double what the typical American public school district spends on each child, and 91 percent above the national average by some measures.

Where the Money Actually Comes From

New York funds its public schools through the same three channels every state uses: local property taxes, state aid, and federal funding. The balance between them, however, is unusually tilted toward local money, which is part of why spending varies so dramatically from one New York community to the next.

The primary vehicle for state aid is Foundation Aid, which accounts for roughly 71 percent of all state school funding and is designed to send more money to districts with lower local property wealth and higher student need. The formula starts with a statewide estimate of the minimum cost to educate a student, calculated at $7,242 per pupil for the 2024 school year, then adjusts that base figure for inflation and district-specific factors. Students with disabilities are weighted 141 percent higher than other students in the calculation, and English language learners and students from low-income households generate additional funding as well. For the 2025-26 school year, the state distributed $37.6 billion in total school aid, the large majority of it through Foundation Aid.

Federal funding, by contrast, is shrinking. It surged to $7.7 billion statewide during the pandemic as Washington poured emergency relief into remote learning and expanded pre-kindergarten programs. The state now expects that federal support to fall back to roughly $3.3 billion by fiscal year 2026, a return to pre-pandemic levels that will leave many districts leaning more heavily on the state and on local taxpayers to cover the gap.

A Tale of Two New Yorks: The Regional Spending Gap

Statewide averages tend to flatten out just how differently New York actually spends money depending on where a child happens to live. Empire Center data for the 2026-27 school year shows Long Island districts planning to spend the most of any region in the state, an average of $41,934 per student, followed by the Mid-Hudson region at $40,490. Western New York districts, the lowest-spending region in the state, are budgeting an average of $30,987 per student, which is still well above the national average but barely three-quarters of what Long Island plans to spend on the same age child. Two years earlier, for the 2024-25 school year, the same regional gap was already visible at a lower scale: Long Island at $37,758, Mid-Hudson at $36,452, and Western New York at $27,846, meaning every region has continued climbing faster than inflation even as the gap between them persists.

At the extreme end sits a small number of outlier districts that make the statewide average look almost modest by comparison. Kiryas Joel Union Free School District in Orange County has proposed the highest per-pupil spending in the state for years running, budgeting $250,241 for each of its roughly 169 enrolled students in the 2026-27 cycle. That number is less shocking once you understand what is driving it: Kiryas Joel's public school exclusively serves students with significant disabilities, while the vast majority of the community's roughly 10,000 school-age children attend private yeshivas that the district is still legally required to bus, supply and provide therapy services for, none of which counts toward its official enrollment. Smaller districts like Newcomb in the Adirondacks ($176,358 per student) and Fire Island on Long Island ($147,860 per student) post similarly outsized figures for the same basic reason: a handful of students spread across fixed costs that do not shrink proportionally.

The Enrollment Collapse Nobody Fully Budgeted For

The other half of the story is school enrollment, and it has been quietly falling for well over a decade. Statewide enrollment declined 7.7 percent between the 2012-13 and 2024-25 school years, from 2.66 million students to 2.45 million, according to the Citizens Budget Commission's earlier research. The pace accelerated sharply during the pandemic, when enrollment fell by more than 132,000 students in just two years. The newer Citizens Budget Commission analysis extends that lens further back, putting the total decline at roughly 12 percent over the past 15 years, and projects another double-digit drop by 2031 as birth rates decline and population growth stalls statewide. On the commission's numbers, only California and New Mexico are losing public school students faster than New York.

New York City has felt this most acutely. Public school enrollment in the city has fallen from roughly 1.1 million students to somewhere between 884,000 and 912,000 depending on the year and the count used, a drop of at least 8 percent since 2020 alone, even after accounting for an influx of roughly 48,000 recent immigrant students since 2022. Hundreds of school buildings citywide are now operating below 60 percent of their physical capacity.

Hold Harmless: Funding the Empty Seats

Ordinarily, a shrinking customer base means a shrinking budget. New York school finance rarely works that way, thanks to a policy commonly known as hold harmless. For more than a decade, the state has guaranteed that no district receives less state aid than it did the prior year, regardless of how many students actually walk through the door. New York City has extended a version of the same logic to its own schools since the 2020-21 school year, protecting individual school budgets from the funding cuts that declining enrollment would otherwise trigger.

The protection is not free. New York City alone has spent roughly $1.6 billion over the past six years shielding schools from enrollment-related cuts, including $388 million this year, the largest single-year total since the pandemic began. The Citizens Budget Commission has estimated that tying school funding more closely to actual enrollment could save the city more than $400 million annually without touching the services students receive, simply by no longer funding empty seats at the same rate as filled ones. Whether the city acts on that recommendation is now a live political question, since ending hold harmless protections would mean real, immediate budget cuts for specific schools and the communities that depend on them.

More Adults, Fewer Students

Some of New York's spending growth has gone toward shrinking class sizes, which by some measures is a genuine success story. The state now averages 11.7 students per teacher, well below the national average of 15.4, and New York City's own class size law, signed in 2022, has pushed staffing ratios lower still in city classrooms. Average teacher salaries statewide now approach $100,000, among the highest in the nation, and some school administrators in individual districts earn well over $300,000 annually.

But staffing growth has not been limited to classroom teachers. Nationally, non-teaching staff now make up more than half of all public school employees, up from under half two decades ago, and New York has followed that pattern closely. Even as the state lost roughly 159,701 students since 2020, according to a Reason Foundation analysis of Census Bureau data, New York school districts added nearly 7,000 non-teaching staff positions over the same period. That combination, fewer students and more adults on the payroll who are not teaching a classroom, is a significant piece of why per-student costs keep climbing even in districts where enrollment is falling.

Does Any of This Show Up in Test Scores?

The honest answer, according to multiple independent analyses, is not proportionally. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, known nationally as the NAEP scores that allow a genuine apples-to-apples comparison across states, New York's fourth graders ranked 32nd in reading and 46th in math among all states, while eighth graders ranked 9th in reading and 22nd in math, according to the Citizens Budget Commission's review of the same data. Measured differently, as raw proficiency rather than relative rank, roughly 31 percent of New York fourth graders tested proficient in reading and 37 percent in math, while about 31 percent of eighth graders were proficient in reading and 26 percent in math, depending on which year's assessment cycle is used.

None of this means New York's classrooms are failing wholesale, and none of the researchers behind these reports argue that they are. Property-rich suburban districts on Long Island and in Westchester continue to fund strong academic programs largely through local property taxes, while high-need districts upstate and in New York City lean more heavily on state aid simply to cover the basics. What the data does suggest is that the state has not built a system capable of noticing, in close to real time, when a shrinking district's costs no longer match its enrollment, or when a well-funded district's outcomes no longer justify its budget.

The Case Defenders of the Spending Make

It would be unfair to present New York's education spending as pure waste without acknowledging the case its defenders make, because there is a real one. New York educates a higher share of students with disabilities and English language learners than many lower-spending states, and both groups require additional staff, specialized services and smaller class sizes that cost more per child by design. The state's cost of living, particularly in and around New York City and on Long Island, is also meaningfully higher than in most of the country, which pushes up everything from teacher salaries to facilities costs regardless of enrollment. The Citizens Budget Commission's own reporting acknowledges that New York's broader social safety net, of which school funding is one piece, has been genuinely important to supporting economic opportunity across the state, even where outcomes have not kept pace with the dollars behind them.

Who Actually Signs Off on This Every Year

For all the state-level policy debate, a large share of New York's school spending is decided directly by residents, not by Albany. Every spring, hundreds of districts across the state put their proposed budgets to a public budget vote, and the results from Nassau and Suffolk Counties in the most recent cycle tell a clear story: every one of Nassau County's 56 districts passed its budget, and only two of 54 Suffolk County districts failed to secure voter approval. That kind of near-universal approval suggests most New York communities remain genuinely comfortable funding their schools at record levels, even as statewide reports raise harder questions about what all that money is actually buying.

What Happens Next

With enrollment projected to keep falling through at least 2031, New York's policymakers are running out of room to avoid the choices they have postponed for years: closing or merging under-enrolled schools, adjusting staffing levels to match shrinking classrooms, or continuing to fund half-empty buildings at a rising cost per child. None of those options is politically comfortable, which is exactly why hold harmless guarantees and similar patches have persisted as long as they have. But the math underneath them is not going away. New York families are, on the whole, voting every spring to keep funding their schools at the highest levels in the country. The open question, one this report does not fully answer, is how much longer a shrinking system can keep absorbing that commitment without a much harder conversation about where the money goes.