Five states have ended in-state tuition for undocumented students since 2025 — four by court order

Five states have ended in-state tuition for undocumented students since 2025

The finding: 21 of the 52 US jurisdictions — 20 states plus the District of Columbia — charge undocumented students the in-state tuition rate, and 19 of those also open state financial aid to them. But the direction of travel has reversed. Between June 2025 and June 2026, five jurisdictions ended access, and only one of the five was a legislature’s decision:

52 jurisdictions (50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico). Researched per state on 2026-06-10 against state statutes and the Higher Ed Immigration Portal; counts recomputed 2026-07-22. This area is volatile — confirm with the admissions office before paying tuition. Primary source

Four of the five went through the courts, not the statehouse. Florida’s repeal was legislative — SB 2-C, ending the fee waiver about 6,500 students were using. The other four were Justice Department suits arguing that in-state tuition for undocumented students is preempted by 8 U.S.C. § 1623, and in each case the state’s policy was voided, rescinded, or struck down. Kentucky’s is on appeal at the Sixth Circuit; Nebraska’s law had stood for twenty years.

Not every challenge has succeeded. Minnesota won dismissal in March 2026 and its Dream Act remains fully in effect, though the Justice Department has appealed. Suits against Illinois, California, Virginia and New Jersey were pending as of this dataset’s research date, and those laws remain in effect while the cases proceed.

Every jurisdiction, by what it actually offers

In-state tuition statewide (0)

Limited — some campuses, or DACA recipients only (0)

No policy — nonresident rates apply (0)

Banned by law — in-state rates or enrollment barred (0)

52 jurisdictions (50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico). Researched per state on 2026-06-10 against state statutes and the Higher Ed Immigration Portal; counts recomputed 2026-07-22. This area is volatile — confirm with the admissions office before paying tuition. Primary source

What the data shows

• Access is not a majority position. 21 jurisdictions offer in-state tuition, 8 offer it on a limited basis, and 23 do not — 7 of those because a state law specifically bars in-state rates or, in three states, enrollment itself.
• Tuition and aid are separate questions. 19 jurisdictions pair in-state tuition with state financial aid; the rest of the in-state group offers the price but not the money. A student can be charged the resident rate and still have no state grant available.
• “Limited” hides two different situations. Some states extend in-state rates only at particular campuses by institutional policy rather than statute; others restrict eligibility to DACA recipients, which excludes undocumented students without DACA. Both land in the same column and mean very different things to an applicant.
• The mechanism is now judicial. Of the five reversals, four came from federal court orders or DOJ consent judgments. That is a faster clock than legislation, and it is why a state’s status can change between an application and a tuition bill.

What this means in practice

If your state is in the in-state group, the rate applies through the state’s own rule — check what documentation it requires, since most conditioning statutes ask for years of in-state high school attendance and an affidavit rather than immigration status. Our state-by-state guide has the per-state detail, including which private scholarship funds accept applicants regardless of status.

If your state is one of the five that ended access, the practical question is what applies to you now rather than what the old rule said. In Texas the state’s filings say DACA recipients retain eligibility while campuses apply the order inconsistently, so the registrar’s office — not a website — is the authority on what you will be billed. Everywhere else in that group, nonresident rates now apply.

This is information about how programs work, not advice about your situation. Confirm with the admissions or bursar’s office before you rely on a rate, and see Know Your Rights for what schools may and may not ask.

Method and caveat

Each jurisdiction was researched against its own statute or regulation and the Higher Ed Immigration Portal’s state page, with the source URL stored on the row. Four distinctions keep the counts honest. First, the unit is the jurisdiction, not the state — 50 states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico, which is why the total is 52 and why “21” means 20 states and D.C. Second, “limited” is a real category, not a hedge: it covers both campus-by-campus institutional policies and DACA-only eligibility, and collapsing it into either “yes” or “no” would misstate what a student faces. Third, the counts are computed from the rows on every site build, so the totals here and the table above cannot drift apart. Fourth, this is the most volatile dataset we publish — a single ruling moves a state, four did so in the last thirteen months, and the research date on each row is the honest limit of what we can promise.

Download the data: tuition_equity_states.json — all 52 jurisdictions with tuition status, state-aid status, the controlling law, and the source URL, plus the computed national counts and the reversal series.

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A college access program, a high school counseling office, a legal-aid org, a newsroom: drop in the current count and the reversal list. When a court moves a state, we update the data and your copy moves with it:

<iframe src="https://migrantusa.com/embed/tuition-equity/" width="100%" height="520"
        style="border:1px solid #e2e8e4;border-radius:8px;max-width:640px"
        title="In-state tuition access for undocumented students, by state" loading="lazy"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:.85rem">In-state tuition access by state — data by
  <a href="https://migrantusa.com/datasets/in-state-tuition-access/">MigrantUSA</a></p>

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Suggested citation: MigrantUSA, “In-state tuition and state financial aid access for undocumented students, by jurisdiction,” migrantusa.com/datasets/in-state-tuition-access/, retrieved [date].

Related

• Dreamer scholarships and in-state tuition by state — the per-state detail, including private scholarship funds
• In-state tuition equity litigation — the cases behind the reversals, with current status
• All open datasets — everything we publish for download and citation