Scholarship Calculator
Estimate your financial aid and scholarship eligibility based on income, grades, and college costs. Plan your education funding.
This scholarship calculator estimates how much of a college bill your awards and federal grants cover, and what is left over. Fill in Total College Cost, Years of Study, Expected Family Contribution and Family Income, then list each award under Scholarships & Grants. Its defaults — $35,000 a year and a $5,000 merit award — return Total Financial Aid $8,395, 24% of costs covered and a Remaining Gap of $26,605.
From FAFSA
Scholarships & Grants
How to Cover Remaining
4-Year Summary
Estimated Federal Grants
Actual amounts depend on FAFSA results
About Scholarship Calculator
The calculation runs in three stages, live in your browser as you type. Awards entered under Scholarships & Grants are added up, with anything marked One Time divided by Years of Study so it becomes a per-year figure. A Pell Grant is then estimated from Family Income on a fixed taper: the full amount up to $30,000 of income, falling by 15 cents per dollar between $30,000 and $50,000, by 10 cents per dollar between $50,000 and $70,000, and nothing above that. SEOG adds a flat $1,000 only when Expected Family Contribution is exactly zero and income is $30,000 or less.
The result card shows Total Financial Aid, Costs Covered as a percentage of one year's cost, your Scholarships subtotal, Estimated Grants and the Remaining Gap. How to Cover Remaining then fills that gap in a fixed order: up to $5,500 of Federal Student Loans, a flat $3,000 of Work Study at ten hours a week, Parent PLUS Loans up to $20,000, and whatever is still left as Out of Pocket. The 4-Year Summary multiplies those per-year figures by Years of Study.
Read the model's boundaries before planning around it. The Pell maximum written into this page is $7,395, the 2023-24 award-year maximum, and the taper is a simplification rather than the Student Aid Index formula the FAFSA applies. Real SEOG varies by school and can run to several thousand dollars. Federal loan limits rise after the first year, but this page applies the $5,500 first-year figure to every year, and work study is a fixed amount rather than a real award. State grants and institutional aid are not modelled at all.
Treat the output as an order-of-magnitude sketch for comparing schools and award packages, not as a financial-aid offer. The authoritative numbers are the net price calculator each US college publishes and the aid letter that college sends. Nothing you type is stored or transmitted; the figures live in the page until you close or reload it.
Use Cases
How to use
Type the yearly price of the school into Total College Cost, then pick 2, 4, 5 or 6 in Years of Study.
Enter your Expected Family Contribution, the number From FAFSA, and your Family Income so Pell Grant and SEOG Grant can be estimated.
Under Scholarships & Grants type a Scholarship Name and its amount, set Annual or One Time, and press Add Scholarship for each further award.
Read Total Financial Aid on the green card, with Costs Covered, Scholarships, Estimated Grants and Remaining Gap beside it.
Check How to Cover Remaining for the Federal Student Loans, Work Study and Parent PLUS Loans figures, and Out of Pocket at the bottom.
Open the 4-Year Summary to see cost, aid, loans and Total Out of Pocket multiplied by the Years of Study you chose.
Pro Tips
- Mark a one-off award One Time, not Annual. The tool divides a One Time amount by Years of Study; leaving it on Annual multiplies a single cheque across every year and understates the gap by thousands.
- SEOG only appears when Expected Family Contribution is exactly 0 and Family Income is $30,000 or less. Any other combination shows $0, so do not read a zero as proof that you would not qualify at a real school.
- Family Income above $70,000 zeroes the Pell Grant in this model. If your income is near that line, try a few values to see how quickly Estimated Grants moves before you rely on the number.
- Total College Cost is per year, not the whole degree. Enter the full cost of attendance the school publishes, including housing, fees and books, rather than tuition alone, or Costs Covered will look better than it is.
- The page keeps nothing. Refreshing resets every field back to $35,000, 4 years, $5,000 EFC and the sample merit award, so screenshot or write down a scenario before you leave to compare it with another.
Troubleshooting
Estimated Grants shows $0 even though the family has a low income.
Pell falls to zero above $70,000 of Family Income in this model, and SEOG only appears when Expected Family Contribution is exactly 0 and income is $30,000 or less. Check both fields; a stray digit in either one is the usual cause.
Out of Pocket stays at $0 although the Remaining Gap is large.
The gap is being absorbed by Parent PLUS Loans, which this page allows up to $20,000 a year before anything is shown as Out of Pocket. Read the How to Cover Remaining panel line by line: a small Out of Pocket figure often means a large borrowing figure above it.
The 4-Year Summary totals look too low for the later years of the degree.
Federal Student Loans are capped at $5,500 for every year here, which is the first-year dependent limit; the real limit rises in later years. The summary simply multiplies the first-year figure by Years of Study, so treat the loan total as a floor.
A one-off award makes the aid look far larger than it is.
The award is still set to Annual. Change its selector to One Time and the amount is divided by Years of Study instead of counted every year, which restores a realistic Remaining Gap.
Frequently Asked Questions
A net price calculator estimates what a student will actually pay a college after grants and scholarships, rather than the sticker price. This page does the same arithmetic in a generic way: it applies a simplified federal grant estimate to any cost you type. It is not a particular college's calculator, and US colleges are required to publish their own, which reflect that school's own aid policies.
From Family Income alone, on a fixed taper. Income of $30,000 or less returns the full $7,395 written into this page; between $30,000 and $50,000 it drops by 15 cents per extra dollar; between $50,000 and $70,000 it starts from $4,395 and drops by 10 cents per dollar; above $70,000 it is zero. The real award depends on the Student Aid Index, enrolment intensity and cost of attendance, not income alone.
It is as accurate as its model and its inputs. This one uses a simplified income taper and a fixed Pell maximum of $7,395, the 2023-24 figure, so it will drift as award years change and it ignores state and institutional aid entirely. Use it to compare scenarios against each other; use the college's own calculator, and then the aid offer, for a number you can plan on.
Only the Expected Family Contribution figure, which you copy in yourself from your FAFSA output; the field is labelled From FAFSA for that reason. Nothing is fetched from the Department of Education and no form is submitted. If you have not filed a FAFSA yet, put in an estimate and treat the grant lines as rough.
It is one year's Total College Cost minus Total Financial Aid, so it is what the awards do not cover. How to Cover Remaining then splits that gap in a fixed order: Federal Student Loans first, capped at $5,500, then $3,000 of work study, then Parent PLUS borrowing up to $20,000, and only what survives all three appears as Out of Pocket.
Yes. Add Scholarship appends a new row with its own Scholarship Name, amount and Annual or One Time selector, and the x button removes a row. Every row is recalculated as you type, so you can add a renewable award and a one-off prize together and see the combined effect on Costs Covered immediately.
The arithmetic works with any cost figure, and Years of Study offers 2, 4, 5 and 6. The grant estimates do not: Pell and SEOG are undergraduate programmes, so leave those lines out of your reading for graduate study and use the tool purely to weigh scholarships against cost and borrowing.
For the scholarship and cost arithmetic, yes. For the grant lines, no: Pell and SEOG require eligible non-citizen status, so an international student should read Estimated Grants as zero regardless of what the page shows and rely on the institutional aid a school offers instead.
Scholarships and grants are not repaid, unlike the loans in the How to Cover Remaining panel, which is why the tool separates the two. They can still carry conditions, such as a minimum grade point average for renewal or enrolment for a set number of credits, and losing an award mid-degree turns next year's gap back into borrowing.
Because it knows things this page cannot: the school's own need-based aid, merit tables, state grant programmes, housing status and cost of attendance for your specific programme. This page applies one generic federal model to whatever cost you type. Where the two disagree, the college's calculator is the one to believe.