Homeschool Laws by State
What home education law requires, in every state and in the District of Columbia. Each page names the statute or regulation it came from, links to the code, and prints the month a person read it, so you can hold our summary against the law itself.
They are grouped by how much is asked of you each year, because that is the question families arrive with. Find yours, then open the code next to what we wrote.
Ask nothing of you each year (9)
Nothing goes in and nothing comes back. The one act still required of you is withdrawing a child who is sitting in a public school today, and that is the step families miss.
Alaska · Idaho · Illinois · Michigan · New Hampshire · New Jersey · Oklahoma · Texas · Wyoming
Ask very little of you (21)
Most often a single sheet, once a year, and in several of these states nothing goes in at all. Where a date exists it is a real date, however casual the form looks.
Alabama · Arizona · Arkansas · California · Connecticut · Delaware · Florida · Georgia · Indiana · Iowa · Kansas · Mississippi · Missouri · Montana · Nevada · New Mexico · Ohio · South Dakota · Utah · Virginia · Wisconsin
Ask for a few particular things (13)
A few genuine requirements, no one of them hard. What trips families up is the calendar rather than the work.
Colorado · Hawaii · Kentucky · Maine · Maryland · Minnesota · Nebraska · North Carolina · Oregon · Tennessee · Vermont · Washington · West Virginia
Ask more than most (8)
Notice, records, and in most of them an assessment or an outside evaluator. More to hold in your head, on dates that will not move for you. Set down in one place it is manageable.
District of Columbia · Louisiana · Massachusetts · New York · North Dakota · Pennsylvania · Rhode Island · South Carolina
Where an outside evaluator or a portfolio is in the picture, what gets read is the log underneath the transcript rather than the transcript. Putting morning time and the church year on a record without inflating it, and the Records Pack if you would rather not build the forms yourself.
Where the law itself names religion (14)
In most of the country the law asks the same of a family whatever it believes. In these fourteen, belief is in the text itself, and it does very different work from one to the next. In some it is a church school or a parochial umbrella that carries the filing for you. In others it is an exemption from testing, or from compulsory attendance altogether, or a line saying nobody may require you to teach against your own doctrine. Each page sets out what its own state actually says, with the section cited. Where a state is not on this list, our reading of its home education law found no such provision. We would rather tell you that than sell you a difference that is not there.
Alabama · Alaska · Colorado · Maryland · Michigan · Minnesota · Missouri · Nebraska · North Carolina · North Dakota · Tennessee · Virginia · Wisconsin · Wyoming
Where the route runs through a church school or a parochial umbrella, the question underneath is what enrolling actually moves and what it leaves exactly where it was. Five of them, taken one at a time, with the section cited for each.
Where this comes from
All 51 entries were read in July 2026, and 22 of them were read again on a day we have on record. Each state page prints its own review date rather than one date for the whole set. Homeschool law moves, sometimes mid-session, and a page like this goes quietly out of date. Before a filing deadline, confirm the current rule with your state department of education or with a homeschool legal organisation. If we have fallen behind, we would rather hear it from you.
Filing is one part of it. Keeping the record is the other, and that is what our Records System is for: the editable transcript with the GPA already working, the course descriptions, and this same cited summary for every state and DC, in a Protestant and a Catholic edition.