Public School Statistics for the United States

By the Public School Stats Editorial Team · Last updated: October 2026

Public School Stats republishes the federal government’s own school numbers — enrollment, staffing, lunch-program eligibility, completions and spending — from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) and EDFacts, with every figure labeled by its school year.

In the 2023–24 school year, state education agencies reported 49,713,983 students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools to the NCES Common Core of Data, spread across 99,596 open public schools and 19,637 local education agencies. Those three counts — students, schools and districts — are the backbone of this site. Every district, state and city page starts from the same federal files, applies the same definitions, and prints the school year next to the number, because federal education data are staggered: the universe and membership files describe 2023–24, the finance files describe fiscal year 2024, and assessment files follow their own release schedule. Mixing years silently is the most common way school statistics get misquoted, so we never do it.

The ten largest school districts in the United States

Ranked by fall membership in the 2023–24 CCD LEA Membership file. New York City is administered through 32 geographic districts in the federal files, so no single New York City agency appears in this ranking; the city’s schools are covered on our New York city page.

See the full ranking on our largest school districts page, the biggest individual campuses on the largest schools page, and browse all covered districts in the district index.

What you can look up here

District pages cover the largest districts in the country with enrollment, school counts, student–teacher ratios computed from full-time-equivalent teachers, free and reduced-price lunch eligibility, regular-diploma recipients, and per-pupil spending from the CCD F-33 finance survey where the district reported it. State pages total the same measures statewide and list each state’s largest districts, with per-pupil spending from the National Public Education Financial Survey (NPEFS). City pages list the largest individual schools in major metros, so readers can see how enrollment concentrates in big campuses. Start with the state index or the city index.

How we handle the numbers

We compute only simple, checkable ratios: a student–teacher ratio is enrollment divided by FTE teachers in the same file year; a lunch-eligibility share is eligible students divided by enrollment in schools that reported lunch counts; per-pupil spending is total current expenditures divided by fall membership in the F-33 file, or the published NPEFS per-pupil figure at state level. Where a district did not report an item, the page says so instead of estimating it. Our methodology pages explain how NCES collects the data, why the years are staggered, and how to read each measure. One deliberate omission: this launch does not publish state test proficiency percentages, because the EDFacts assessment download could not be retrieved and verified during production — we would rather leave a documented gap than publish an unverified rate. The methodology page on proficiency explains what EDFacts measures and how those files are normally obtained.

Data: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data and EDFacts, retrieved October 2026, from nces.ed.gov. Enrollment, staffing and lunch figures are for the 2023–24 school year; finance figures are fiscal year 2024 (school year 2023–24) unless a page labels them otherwise.

Disclaimer: Public School Stats republishes official federal statistics for general information only. Figures are reported as published by NCES and EDFacts and may include imputed or revised values; for decisions affecting a specific school or district, confirm the figure with the district or the NCES source file. See our full Disclaimer.