What you can afford

The limits and your first-year budget

Some aid has an income limit: a figure, published by the state or the university, above which a program stops paying. A dollar over one can cost tens of thousands over four years. Whether you are over is decided early: federal and most state aid looks at income from the tax year two years before, and at savings on the day the FAFSA is filed. Your first-year budget is the highest first-year price, after grants, that your family could pay from what you have and what each of you could borrow.

What a SmartTuition plan saves

The difference, over four years, between a SmartTuition plan and the standard approach: savings first, then loans for the rest. The box shows the smallest and the largest saving among the colleges on your list. A college where the parents would borrow more than $65,000, or more than a family like yours could repay, is left out. It uses the credit you entered. If you are not sure of it, the plan and the standard approach borrow at the same average rate. It counts loan interest and the federal tax credit.

To claim this credit, the parent who claims it and the student each need a Social Security number that is valid for work. A family that files with a taxpayer ID number instead gets no credit.

Where the figures come from

Every income limit on this page comes from a state law or a university's own published policy, and our guides quote the source. A college's price is what it charges: tuition and fees, housing and food on campus, and books. We take those from the U.S. Department of Education, or from the college's own published price where we have recorded it, and project them to your start year. From that we take off the average grant the Department reports for families at your income. The Department's own figure for a year also counts travel and spending money, which the college doesn't bill and a 529 can't pay for. We leave those out. At some colleges we still use the Department's figure for a year, until we have read the college's own prices. The grants are averages for students who received aid, so your own award will differ. Nothing here is an offer from a school.

What this cannot tell you yet

We include merit scholarships only where we have checked the rules against their source. So far, that is Georgia's HOPE and Zell Miller, Florida's Bright Futures and Benacquisto, California's Cal Grant A, New York's STEM Incentive, Washington's College Bound, Tennessee's lottery scholarships, Arkansas's Academic Challenge, Wyoming's Hathaway Scholarship, Alaska's Performance Scholarship and Nevada's Millennium Scholarship, at each state's public colleges, and the scholarships of 115 universities. Elsewhere, at a school that gives aid for grades or test scores, your cost could be much lower than shown. Out-of-state prices at public universities come from the school's own price calculator where it publishes its figures. Otherwise the price is the out-of-state cost less any Pell Grant, before aid from the school itself, and you can enter the school's own estimate instead. Where a school reports nothing for your income level, we say so and do not guess.

When your award letter arrives, a full SmartTuition plan shows what to pay from where, each semester, with your real numbers.