TEACH Grant: Amounts, Eligibility, and Service Obligation

To meet the TEACH Grant requirements, you need a cumulative GPA of at least 3.25 (or a qualifying admissions-test score), enrollment in a teaching program your school has designated as TEACH-eligible, U.S. citizenship or eligible non-citizen status, and a signed Agreement to Serve or Repay committing you to four full academic years of full-time teaching in a high-need subject at a low-income school, completed within eight years of leaving school. Miss any part of that service commitment and every dollar you received converts to a federal loan with interest backdated to the day it was disbursed.

How Much the Grant Is Worth

The statutory maximum is $4,000 per academic year, but federal sequestration has reduced every disbursement since 2013. For the 2026 award year the cut is 5.70%, bringing the effective maximum to $3,772.¹ The reduction is automatic and applied before the money reaches your school.

Lifetime caps depend on your level. Undergraduate and post-baccalaureate awards combined top out at $16,000, the equivalent of four full annual awards. Graduate students in a TEACH-eligible master’s program can receive up to $8,000.² Someone who receives grants as an undergraduate and later returns for graduate study can draw from both pools, but the two caps don’t merge.

Who Qualifies

Eligibility is set by 34 CFR 686.11 and comes down to four requirements.³

The first is academic. You need a cumulative GPA of at least 3.25 on a 4.0 scale. First-year undergraduates can qualify using either their final high school GPA or their college GPA so far. Graduate students beyond their first payment period use their graduate GPA. Your school rechecks this each payment period, so a semester where your cumulative average slips below 3.25 can knock you out of that term’s award even if you qualified the year before.

The second is a standardized-test alternative. If your GPA falls short, you can qualify by scoring above the 75th percentile on at least one section of a nationally normed admissions test such as the SAT, ACT, or GRE. Placement tests don’t count.

The third is program-based. Your school must participate in the TEACH Grant program, and your specific degree path must be designated by the institution as TEACH-eligible. These are typically programs leading to teaching certification. If your financial aid office doesn’t recognize your program as eligible, no GPA or test score will get you the grant.

The fourth is citizenship. You must be a U.S. citizen or eligible non-citizen under the same rules that apply to other federal Title IV aid.

What You’re Agreeing To

The grant is only a grant if you complete the service obligation attached to it. When you accept the money you sign an Agreement to Serve or Repay committing to four full academic years of full-time teaching, in a high-need field, at a low-income school, with the high-need subject making up the majority of the classes you teach each year.⁴ Part-time work doesn’t count. Teaching at a school outside the low-income directory doesn’t count, however many years you do it.

You have eight years from the date you stop being enrolled at the institution that awarded the grant to finish those four years of qualifying teaching. The four years don’t have to be consecutive, so a career break or a school change is survivable, but the eight-year clock starts as soon as you graduate, withdraw, or drop below the enrollment level your school treats as being in the program.⁵

Qualifying Subjects

The permanently designated high-need fields are mathematics, science (including computer science), foreign language, bilingual education, English language acquisition, reading specialist, and special education. Additional fields qualify if they appear on the Department of Education’s annual Teacher Shortage Area Nationwide Listing for the state where you teach.⁶

If your subject is later removed from the shortage list, your service still counts as long as the field was listed either when you signed the Agreement to Serve or Repay or when you began teaching in it.⁶

Qualifying Schools

The school must serve low-income students, identified through the Teacher Cancellation Low Income (TCLI) Directory. The directory is updated annually and covers public and private elementary and secondary schools along with educational service agencies.⁵ Check the directory before you accept a position, and check it again before each school year, because schools rotate on and off the list as demographics shift.

The October 31 Certification

Each year, by October 31, you must submit either documentation that you completed a full school year of qualifying teaching or a certification that you intend to satisfy your service obligation. It goes to the Department of Education’s TEACH Grant servicer. Miss the deadline and ignore the follow-up notices, and every grant you received converts to a loan with interest backdated to disbursement. There is no built-in grace period on the conversion trigger, so confirm each submission was received.

Applying for the Grant

Getting the grant runs in a specific order, and every year you receive it you repeat most of these steps.

File the FAFSA for the academic year in question. This establishes your basic federal aid eligibility.⁶
Complete TEACH Grant counseling on StudentAid.gov before your first disbursement, and repeat it for every year you receive the grant.⁷
Sign the Agreement to Serve or Repay on the Federal Student Aid website. This is the binding contract.⁴
Confirm with your financial aid office that your program is TEACH-eligible.

Last year’s counseling and agreement do not carry over. Every year you receive the grant, you do it again.

What Failure Costs

If you don’t complete four qualifying years within your eight-year window, every TEACH Grant you ever received becomes a Direct Unsubsidized Loan, not just your most recent one.⁵ Interest is charged retroactively from the original disbursement date of each grant, so by the time conversion happens you can already owe years of accumulated interest on top of the principal.

The interest rate is the fixed rate that was in effect for Direct Unsubsidized Loans when the grant was first disbursed.⁸ For grants disbursed between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, that rate is 6.39% for undergraduates and 7.94% for graduate students.⁹

If you already know you will not complete the obligation, you can request conversion voluntarily rather than watching interest build while the window runs out.⁴

Pausing or Ending the Obligation

The eight-year clock is not immovable. You can request a suspension in one-year increments for a qualifying FMLA condition (serious health condition, caring for a family member, or the birth or adoption of a child), your own active-duty military service, a spouse’s deployment or permanent change of station that moves you out of your state or out of the continental U.S., or residence or work in a federally declared major disaster area. Each category is capped at three years total, and time spent enrolled in a program of study or meeting licensure requirements counts against the FMLA cap.¹⁰

The request must be filed on the Secretary-approved form before your grant converts to a loan. Waiting until after conversion is too late.

Permanent discharge is available if you become totally and permanently disabled, through a 100% service-connected VA rating (or an individual unemployability rating), qualifying SSDI or SSI status, or certification by a licensed physician, nurse practitioner, physician assistant, or psychologist that you cannot work due to a condition expected to last at least five years or result in death.¹¹ The obligation is also discharged on the recipient’s death.

If your grant was converted in error, or converted while you were actually meeting the service obligation, reconsideration is available and worth pursuing quickly; a federal audit found that more than 10,000 recipients had grants converted due to servicer errors rather than any failure to teach.¹²

1
Federal Student Aid. FY 26 Sequester-Required Changes to the Title IV Student Aid Programs
2
Federal Student Aid. Calculating TEACH Grants
3
eCFR. 34 CFR 686.11 – Eligibility to Receive a Grant
4
eCFR. 34 CFR 686.12 – Agreement to Serve or Repay
5
Federal Student Aid. TEACH Grants
6
Federal Student Aid. 2024-2025 Federal Student Aid Handbook – Volume 9, Chapter 1 Eligibility for TEACH Grants
7
Federal Student Aid. 2023-2024 Federal Student Aid Handbook – Volume 9 – Chapter 2 – TEACH Grant Counseling, and the Agreement to Serve or Repay
8
Federal Student Aid. TEACH Grant Conversion Counseling Guide
9
Federal Student Aid. Interest Rates for Direct Loans First Disbursed Between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026
10
eCFR. 34 CFR Part 686 Subpart E – Service and Repayment Obligations
11
Federal Student Aid. How To Qualify and Apply for Total and Permanent Disability (TPD) Discharge
12
Federal Student Aid. TEACH Grant Reconsideration