The School-Level Finance Survey consists of data submitted annually to NCES by state education agencies (SEAs). The survey provides finance data for schools that provide free public elementary and secondary (prekindergarten through grade 12) education in the United States.
The FY 22 SLFS data file contains 106,961 records representing public elementary and secondary education schools across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. SEAs reported finance data for 100,736, or 94.2 percent, of those school records.
The data file includes variables for current expenditures, salaries, and employee benefits by function; selected exhibit and other expenditure items of interest (e.g., teacher salaries, books and periodicals, selected technology expenditures); as well as identification and school characterization variables for each school.
NCES 2025-047r corrects pagination issues in NCES 2025-047. The data included in the original file remains unchanged in the revised file.
Update March 2026 – Because there were no further changes reported by SEA’s, we will not be publishing a 2a file. Please consider the 1a file to be final.
Under law, public use data collected and distributed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) may be used only for statistical purposes. Any effort to determine the identity of any reported case by public-use data users is prohibited by law. Violations are subject to Class E felony charges of a fine up to $250,000 and/or a prison term up to 5 years. NCES does all it can to assure that the identity of data subjects cannot be disclosed. All direct identifiers, as well as any characteristics that might lead to identification, are omitted or modified in the dataset to protect the true characteristics of individual cases. Any intentional identification or disclosure of a person or institution violates the assurances of confidentiality given to the providers of the information. Therefore, users shall:
- Use the data in any dataset for statistical purposes only.
- Make no use of the identity of any person or institution discovered inadvertently, and advise NCES of any such discovery.
- Not link any dataset with individually identifiable data from other NCES or non-NCES datasets.
| Metadata | Description |
|---|---|
| Data weighted |
No
|
| Data part of a series |
No
|
| Data access | Public-use |