How Much Financial Aid Will I Get?

The amount of college financial aid you’ll get depends on a lot of factors, including your school’s cost of attendance, your (and potentially your parents’) income and assets, your family size and how many of your siblings go to college too.

But there are ways to estimate the amount of aid you’ll receive, including using your school’s net price calculator. Some students also automatically qualify for certain federal grants. For example, families with exceptional financial need are eligible for the maximum Pell Grant, which provides up to $7,395 in the 2023-24 school year for undergraduates.

Read on for more details about how to figure out the financial aid you can expect to receive.

How Your Financial Aid Is Calculated

Here’s how the basic formula for distributing federal financial aid works:

School’s cost of attendance – expected family contribution (soon to be known as “student aid index”) = Financial need

Your financial need is the difference between the amount your school costs per year and the amount the government determines your family could potentially contribute toward those costs. The first element of this formula, cost of attendance (COA), is calculated individually by each school and includes tuition, fees, housing, meals, transportation, books, supplies and child care. You can find your school’s COA on its financial aid website.

The information you provide on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or the FAFSA, determines your expected family contribution (EFC). It’s not precisely the amount you and your family will be required to pay for college, since that can change from school to school. But you can think of it as an indicator of your financial need. If your EFC is 0, you’re considered to have the highest amount of financial need, and you’ll receive the maximum Pell Grant.

Confirm Your Dependency Status

Your eligibility for financial aid is closely linked to whether you’re considered a dependent or an independent student. If you’re an independent student, you don’t have to include parent information, such as parent income or assets, when you apply for financial aid. Independent students may qualify for more need-based financial aid; they also have higher loan limits when borrowing federal unsubsidized loans as undergraduates.

The federal government determines dependency status based on certain specific factors. You’re automatically an independent student if you’re:

• 24 years old or over
• Married (or separated but not legally divorced)
• Pursuing a master’s or doctoral degree
• A parent who provides more than half of your children’s financial support
• Living with non-child or -spouse dependents and you provide more than half of their financial support
• An active-duty or veteran member of the U.S. armed forces
• An emancipated minor, or you’re in a legal guardianship
• An unaccompanied young person either homeless or at risk of homelessness
• In foster care, a ward of the court or both of your parents have died (at any time since age 13)

If none of these situations apply to you, then you’re a dependent student and you must add your parents’ information to the FAFSA, meaning their income and assets will affect your financial aid. For some students, this feels inappropriate because they do not have contact with their parents, or their parents refuse to provide their information.

In these cases, you can choose the “I am unable to provide information about my parent(s)” option on the FAFSA and fill out an additional “special circumstances” form. The type of aid you can get may be limited to unsubsidized loans only, and you won’t be given an EFC. Your school, however, will ultimately determine how much financial aid to give you.

Check Your School’s Net Price

It’s important to remember that most students don’t pay a school’s full sticker price each year. A more realistic number to look at is net price, or the amount a student pays out of pocket that takes into account grant and scholarship aid received.

As of the 2019-20 school year, the average annual net price was $14,200 at four-year public colleges and $28,100 at private nonprofit four-year colleges, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Each college has a net price calculator on its website, which you can find a link to via the U.S. Department of Education’s Net Price Calculator Center. You’ll enter basic information like your age, anticipated living arrangements at school, marital status, number of children and household income. The calculator will then give you an estimate of the total grant aid you’ll receive.

You could end up getting even more financial aid, however. You could qualify for additional merit aid based on your academic performance and personal characteristics, for example. Or you could get extra grants if your financial circumstances change after you submit the FAFSA and you appeal for more aid.

Estimate Your Expected Family Contribution

The clearest way to predict the amount of financial aid you’ll receive is to view your EFC. The federal government will send your official number as part of your Student Aid Report (SAR) once you’ve submitted the FAFSA.

The government determines your EFC based on an elaborate formula that takes into account several financial and family factors, all given individual weighting. Some assets and portions of savings and income are protected from the calculation.

For instance, while students must report their parents’ investments on the FAFSA (if they’re considered dependent), certain investments won’t be counted in the EFC, such as the value of a parent’s home or their retirement accounts. Also, up to $7,040 in student income won’t be included in the amount he or she is expected to contribute to college costs. After that $7,040, only half of the student’s income will be included in the EFC.

It’s complicated to determine your EFC on your own if you’d like to figure it out before you submit the FAFSA. But you can use the government’s FAFSA4Caster tool to get a more detailed sense of the federal financial aid available to you than you’ll typically see using a net price calculator. To fill out the FAFSA4Caster, you’ll answer simplified versions of the questions on the FAFSA.

Note that the FAFSA is getting a major overhaul for the 2024-25 award year, and the EFC metric will be replaced with the Student Aid Index (SAI) to determine financial aid eligibility. The SAI metric is similar to the EFC and uses factors like a family’s income compared to poverty guidelines to calculate grant awards.

Know the Types of Aid Available

Based on your EFC—and potentially other information gathered from additional financial aid forms, like the CSS Profile—your school will provide a financial aid award letter when you’ve been accepted.

You’ll be offered need-based and/or non-need-based financial aid. You’ll receive need-based aid if your EFC leads to a determination that you have enough financial need. Need-based aid includes federal subsidized loans—which don’t charge you interest during certain periods—the Pell Grant and work-study. Non-need-based aid includes federal unsubsidized loans and PLUS loans. Merit aid is given out in the form of college-specific grants or scholarships.

Not all types of aid listed on your award letter are truly “awards.” Some types, like loans, you’ll have to pay back, and some loans come with less generous terms and interest rates than others.

To make up for a gap between your need-based and merit aid and the cost of attendance, for instance, some schools may suggest your parents take out a federal parent PLUS loan, which is a form of non-need-based aid that carries higher interest rates and fees than other federal loan types.

You’re not required to take out all the loans offered in your financial aid package. When considering how to pay for college, look carefully at the financial aid you’ve been given and understand clearly the total amount it will cost to attend school—which means taking into account any loans’ interest rates and repayment terms.