Education Spending per Pupil — All 169 Connecticut Towns

The state Department of Education's Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil for every town, in one school year.

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Read this before ranking towns: this is the state Department of Education’s Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil (NCEP), the per-pupil figure each town’s own pages print, for school year —. It leaves out transportation, capital, debt service and adult education, so it is not a town’s whole education budget divided by its students. For a town whose regional district runs every grade, the state reports the district’s figure, not the town’s, so the member towns of one district share a figure and a rank. Special-education intensity, grade mix and school size drive much of the spread — a high figure is not proof of inefficiency, and a low one is not proof of thrift. How the figure behaves when enrollment falls, and six other ways to read it: seven ways to read per-pupil spending.
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Lowest per pupil
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Statewide median
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Highest per pupil

Net current expenditures per pupil — all 169 towns

Net current expenditures divided by the average daily membership of the resident students each town pays for, school year —. Sorted lowest to highest; rank 1 is the lowest figure, which describes the amount, not the schools. Towns with the same figure share a rank.

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Source: CT State Department of Education, Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil (CGS 10-261), fields ncep, nce and adm, via ct_ncep_towns.json. A K-12 regional town’s figure is its district’s, named in from_district.

The full table

All towns with the per-pupil figure, the two parts it divides, and whose figure it is.

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How this ranking is made

Per pupil = net current expenditures ÷ average daily membership (ADM), as the state Department of Education publishes them for each town. Net current expenditures are defined in state law (CGS 10-261(a)(3)) as total current educational expenditures, less pupil transportation, capital and debt service, adult education, health and welfare services for nonpublic school children, tuition received for nonresident pupils, and food services and student activities paid for by their own receipts or by child-nutrition aid. Spending paid from other state and federal grants is not on that list. A town that pays tuition for students educated elsewhere counts that tuition. ADM is a year-average count of the resident students the town is responsible for, wherever they attend; October-1 headcounts differ from it.

  • Regional school districts. Where a regional district runs every grade, the state reports one row for the district, and each member town carries it: the table names the district. Where a regional district runs only some grades, the state folds its costs onto each member town by that town’s share of its students, so every town is measured across every grade.
  • Small denominators: in the smallest towns a handful of high-cost placements moves the figure by hundreds of dollars. Year-to-year jumps in small towns are usually that, not policy.
  • Scale: very small schools lose economies of scale; some of the highest figures belong to towns running a tiny school rather than towns paying generously.
  • School year, not audited year. The state publishes NCEP for school years that run later than the audited fiscal years on the spending and other audited pages, so this page’s year is newer than theirs. Each town’s Education Spending page carries the full series back to 2007-08.

Until 2026-09-25 this page ranked a figure the site computed itself: audited education expenditures ÷ average enrollment from the state’s municipal indicators. It was not the state’s measure, and for a town in a regional district it depended on how the district billed its members; the page now ranks the state’s own. The two measures are set side by side for every town, with the known problems in each, on two ways to measure per-pupil spending.

More rankings: education spending vs. income · spending per resident · tax rates