Indiana Homeschool Requirements: The One Record Anybody Can Ask You For

Indiana's homeschool law is short enough to read over a cup of coffee, and most of what families worry about is not in it. There is no registration you must complete, no curriculum anyone approves, no test your child must sit, and no subject list the state hands you. What Indiana does have is one undefined word, one number, one record, and one form that a lot of high school families discover too late. Here is the whole picture, taken from the Indiana Code itself, the Indiana Department of Education's own Homeschool Help Sheet, and the state's scholarship materials.

The short version

• Your homeschool is legally a nonaccredited nonpublic school. That single classification explains almost every rule below.
• Compulsory attendance starts at 7, not 6. Under IC 20-33-2-6 a student is bound from the fall term of the school year in which they turn seven until they graduate, turn eighteen, or turn sixteen and complete the state's exit interview process. IDOE puts it plainly: kindergarten is encouraged but not mandatory.
• Registration is not required. IDOE hosts an enrollment report, and it is voluntary. Under IC 20-33-2-21, a nonpublic school furnishes the number of students by grade level only "on request of the secretary of education".
• 180 days of instruction. You decide which days and how long each day runs. If you start mid year, days already attended at the first school count toward the 180.
• Keep an attendance record. There is no state form. Under IC 20-33-2-20 it exists "solely to verify the enrollment and attendance of a student" at the request of the secretary of education or your local school corporation superintendent.
• Instruction must be "equivalent to that given in public schools" under IC 20-33-2-28. IDOE states directly that "State law does not define equivalency of instruction".
• No state curriculum, no state textbooks, no required subjects. IC 20-33-2-12 says a nonaccredited nonpublic school "is not bound by any requirements set forth in IC 20 or IC 21 with regard to curriculum or the content of educational programs offered by the school."
• No testing of any kind is required. IDOE recommends periodic standardized achievement testing. Recommends, not requires.
• Withdrawing a high school student takes a specific signed form, and skipping it has a consequence at the BMV. See below, because this is the one that hurts.
• No public school or state diploma. The parent issues it.

The undefined word at the center of Indiana law

Indiana's compulsory attendance statute makes it unlawful for a parent to fail, neglect or refuse to send a child to public school "unless the child is being provided with instruction equivalent to that given in public schools." That is the standard. That is the whole standard.

Then IC 20-33-2-12 removes the obvious way you might have measured yourself against it: a nonaccredited nonpublic school is not bound by any curriculum or program requirement in the education code. So the state asks for equivalence and simultaneously says none of its own content rules apply to you.

Families read this two ways, and one of them is a mistake. The relaxed reading is that "equivalent" is unenforceable, so nothing matters. The anxious reading is that some official somewhere holds a secret checklist. Neither is right, and IDOE's own guidance quietly tells you what the word is actually for:

"If there is ever a question of educational neglect, keeping good attendance records and other documentation regarding continuing educational activity is highly instrumental in addressing these concerns."

That is the state telling you, in its own voice, that "equivalent" is a standard nobody applies to you routinely and somebody could apply to you once. The scenario is not an audit. It is a complaint, a custody dispute, a truancy referral from a school that never got the withdrawal paperwork, or a neighbor who means well. In every one of those, the question is answered by what you can show, and what you can show is decided months or years before anyone asks.

180 days, and what actually counts

Indiana expects 180 days of instruction in a school year running July 1 through June 30. IDOE's guidance is unusually relaxed about the shape of them: "You decide which days your school will be in session, and how long to teach each day."

Two practical notes that save families real anxiety. First, mid year transfers: days already attended at the previous school count toward the 180 at your homeschool, so a family that withdraws in November is not starting the count over. Second, there is no hours per day figure in Indiana law at all. Some states set one. Indiana did not.

The attendance record, and the two people who can ask for it

This is Indiana's entire documentation requirement, and it is worth understanding exactly how small it is. IC 20-33-2-20 requires a daily attendance record, and in a nonpublic school that record is kept "solely to verify the enrollment and attendance of a student" upon request of the secretary of education or the superintendent of the school corporation where the school is located. IDOE confirms there is no special form.

So: two officials, one question, one record. Nobody can compel your lesson plans, your child's work, your test scores, or your curriculum choices, because none of those are what the statute authorizes anyone to request.

Which is exactly why the attendance record deserves more care than its size suggests. It is not a formality you keep in case of an audit that will probably never come. It is the only document in Indiana that has a legally defined audience, and it is the first thing you will reach for on the one day it matters.

The withdrawal form that decides whether your teenager drives

If your child is already enrolled somewhere, you have to withdraw them, and Indiana attaches an unusual consequence to how you do it.

IDOE states that homeschooled students are generally not dropouts. They are transfer students, "who keep their driver's licenses upon withdrawal." But there is a condition, and here is the department's own wording: for a student who has been enrolled in high school, the parent or guardian must sign the Withdrawal to Non-Accredited Non-public School Located in Indiana form. And then the sentence families need to read twice: "If a high school student is withdrawn from school without a signed Withdrawal form, the student will be considered a dropout and the BMV will revoke or refuse to issue a learner's permit or driver's license."

That is the highest stakes ten minutes in Indiana homeschooling, and it is administrative. It has nothing to do with your curriculum, your teaching, or your child. It is one signature on the correct form at the correct school office, and a family that pulls a fifteen year old out over spring break with a phone call and a polite email may not learn it went wrong until a birthday, a permit application and a very upset teenager.

For younger students, IDOE's guidance is simpler: notify the principal in writing of your decision, and request a copy of your child's records, which you are entitled to under state law and FERPA. You do not need a homeschool number first, because there is no homeschool number.

The reporting question, answered precisely

Indiana families get contradictory answers about registering, and the reason is that two true things sound different.

The statute is narrow. IC 20-33-2-21(a) requires a nonpublic school to furnish the number of students by grade level on request of the secretary of education. That is a response to a request, not an annual filing, and it asks for a count, not your child's name.

IDOE's Homeschool Help Sheet, meanwhile, opens its law section with the phrase "In addition to reporting your enrollment," which reads to a nervous parent like a requirement. The voluntary online enrollment report is real, IDOE hosts it, and districts sometimes ask families to complete it.

The practical answer: you are not breaking Indiana law by not registering, and there is no penalty attached to skipping it. Some families report anyway because it produces a tidy paper trail and heads off a district phone call. That is a preference, not compliance. Decide it on those terms rather than out of fear.

What Indiana gives you, and what it does not

Two of these are genuinely valuable, and two are closed doors that families discover late. All four are worth knowing before you plan a high school.

The Education Scholarship Account, and the trade attached to it. Indiana's ESA program serves students with disabilities and their siblings: per the state's 2026 ESA FAQ, a student with a disability may receive up to $20,000 annually and siblings up to $8,000, with the application open March 1 through September 1, 2026 and a priority window running through April 15. As of the 2026-2027 year the program is administered by IDOE rather than the Treasurer of State. Eligibility runs through an active Indiana IEP or service plan. The trade is real and you should hear it before you apply: accepting an ESA means signing a state agreement with conditions attached, including participation in assessments, so a family that valued being left alone is choosing something different from what it had. Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of therapy and a lot of curriculum. It is also a different relationship with the state. Read the handbook, not a summary of it, and decide with your eyes open.

Sports, on the IHSAA's terms. Participation in public school extracurriculars is a local decision, and the IHSAA sets criteria for homeschooled students that are more demanding than most families expect: homeschooled for the previous three consecutive years, completion of the statewide examinations, grade information submitted to the school, and enrollment in at least one class per day at the school being played for. If a varsity uniform is part of your child's plan, work backward from those four items early, not in the spring of ninth grade.

21st Century Scholars is closed. IDOE states that students enrolled in nonaccredited nonpublic schools, including homeschools, are not eligible for the 21st Century Scholars program. For an Indiana family counting on that particular college promise, this is the single most important sentence on this page, and it is better learned in third grade than in eleventh.

The diploma is yours to issue. Homeschooled students do not receive a diploma from the local public school or from IDOE. The department "strongly recommends" keeping good records of high school courses for colleges and employers while noting those records are not required by law. A student at least sixteen may instead take the High School Equivalency exam, though most homeschool graduates never need to.

College credit, and the accounting line that closes the free version

The Indiana Department of Education's homeschool help sheet answers sports, testing, 21st Century Scholars and the diploma. It says nothing at all about dual credit. That silence is not an answer, and it costs families real money, so here is what Indiana's own statutes say, read start to finish.

Indiana's dual credit law is built on the school corporation, and one word does the excluding

Article 43 of Title 21 is where college credit for high school students lives, and its vocabulary tells you who it was written for. Secondary credit, at IC 21-43-1-9, means "credit toward graduation requirements granted by a student's school corporation upon the successful completion of a course taken under a postsecondary enrollment opportunity established under IC 21-43-4." The entitlement that follows names exactly four bodies whose approval creates it, at IC 21-43-4-5: a school corporation, a charter school, "a state accredited nonpublic school (as defined in IC 20-18-2-18.7)", or an eligible school as defined in the choice scholarship statute.

An Indiana homeschool is a nonaccredited nonpublic school. That is the whole point of it, and it is what buys you the curriculum freedom described at the top of this page. The word doing the excluding here is accredited, and it is the same word, working the other way, in both places.

Do not read that as a loss, because it mostly is not one. Section 5 exists to force somebody else's school to honor a college course on your child's transcript. You write the transcript. Whether that college course counts toward your child's graduation requirements is already your decision, made the day you decided to homeschool. What Indiana's dual credit law actually withholds from you is not the credit. It is the money.

The money stops at a count your child is not in

Follow the free version to its funding line and you find the real gate, and it is an accounting term rather than an eligibility rule. IC 21-43-4-19.5 is how Ivy Tech gets paid when it waives a high school student's tuition:

The school corporation in which the student described in subdivision (2) resides shall pay the individual's tuition to Ivy Tech Community College for each year the student is included in the school corporation's ADM.

ADM is average daily membership, the enrollment count a school corporation reports and gets funded on. A homeschooled student is in no school corporation's ADM, so there is no district to send the bill to, so the waiver has no payer. The High School Fast Track program at IC 21-43-8-2(b) is worded the same way, tying the school corporation's obligation to the years the individual "is included in the school corporation's ADM." Nobody wrote a rule excluding homeschoolers from free dual credit in Indiana. They wrote a payment mechanism that only works for enrolled students, which has the same effect and is much harder to notice.

The admission door is open by statute, and it is the sentence to bring with you

Now the good news, and it is genuinely good. IC 21-43-4-10 protects the thing a homeschool family is most often told is impossible, and it mentions no school corporation at all:

A student may apply for enrollment to an eligible institution. The eligible institution shall accept or reject the student based on the standards ordinarily used to decide student enrollments. However, a student applying to participate in a postsecondary enrollment opportunity may not be refused admission solely because the student has not graduated from a secondary school.

An eligible institution, at IC 21-43-1-3, is an accredited public or private Indiana college or university granting a baccalaureate or associate degree that offers postsecondary enrollment opportunities. So the college may hold your child to its ordinary admission standards, and it may not turn your child away for the one reason a homeschooled sixteen year old is usually turned away.

Then ask for money, because a second statute invites you to. IC 21-43-4-12: "Upon demonstration of financial need, an eligible institution may grant financial assistance, including a waiver of tuition under IC 21-14-8, to a student accepted for admission to the eligible institution." That is a may rather than a shall, and it is granted by the institution rather than by the state, which means it is a conversation with a financial aid officer rather than an application to a program. Have that conversation before you enroll, not after the bill arrives.

Two more sentences worth knowing before your child registers. Under IC 21-43-4-15, a student is entitled to the postsecondary credit on successful completion, with one condition added in 2014: for a course taught in a high school setting, the student "must achieve at least the equivalent of a 2.0 on a 4.0 unweighted grading scale, as established by the eligible institution," in order to enroll in subsequent related dual credit coursework in the same subject. And under IC 21-43-4-5.2, if the course is in the statewide core transfer library, another state educational institution "shall grant credit for successfully completed courses" that have articulations listed there. Check the core transfer library for the specific course before you pay for it. That list is the difference between credit and a nice experience.

The two sentences that assume a principal you do not have

Indiana wrote parts of this chapter without homeschoolers in mind, and the seams show. IC 21-43-4-4 says a student may enroll in an eligible institution's courses full-time or part-time during secondary school "upon the recommendation of a school administrator." IC 21-43-4-7 says a student who intends to enroll "shall notify the principal of the school in which the student is enrolled." Neither says who that is when the school is a family.

We are not going to resolve that for you, because the college's registrar will. What we will tell you is the position Indiana law already puts you in: you operate a nonaccredited nonpublic school, and no other administrator exists. Sign as the administrator of your school, in writing, on paper you produce, and hand it in with the application rather than waiting to be asked. Note also that IC 21-43-4-10, quoted above, contains no administrator condition at all. If an office cites Section 4 at you, Section 10 is the sentence to put next to it.

The district door, and the testing protection attached to it

This page has already quoted IC 20-33-2-12 for the freedom it gives you over curriculum. Subsection (b) of the same section is the part families never get told about, and it is the door into a public high school's own dual credit sections. A student attending a nonaccredited nonpublic school is not prohibited from "enrolling in a particular educational program or participating in a particular educational initiative offered by an accredited public, nonpublic, or state board approved nonpublic school" if the governing body or superintendent approves, in the case of a public school, or the administrative authority, in the case of an accredited or state board approved nonpublic school.

That is permission, not a right. The person who decides is the superintendent or the governing body, which makes this a spring conversation with a named human rather than a form. And subsection (c) removes the fear that usually stops families from asking:

A student who attends a school described in subsection (a) who also enrolls in a particular educational program or initiative as permitted under subsection (b) may be offered the opportunity to participate in state standardized assessments, but such participation is not required.

Taking one class at the high school does not pull your family into state testing. The statute says so out loud.

The state-issued diploma nobody mentions

Because this page tells you the diploma is yours to issue, it owes you the alternative Indiana actually offers, and it is not the equivalency exam. IC 21-43-8 lets any state educational institution establish a high school fast track to college program "that offers qualified individuals an opportunity to earn a high school diploma while earning credits for a degree." The eligibility rule is two lines, and the second one is written for your family:

To be eligible to earn a high school diploma, an individual participating in the program established under this chapter must be either: (1) at least nineteen (19) years of age and not enrolled in a school corporation; or (2) at least seventeen (17) years of age and have consent from the high school the individual attended most recently.

The high school your homeschooled seventeen year old attended most recently is yours, and the consent is yours to give. Completion requires a qualifying examination and the coursework to meet both the state board's minimum high school course requirements and the institution's own, under IC 21-43-8-3. And then IC 21-43-8-5, which is the sentence that makes this real. On being notified that a student has completed the requirements, the Indiana state board of education must do two things: "grant to the individual a high school diploma that states the name of the state educational institution at which the individual earned the high school diploma", and then provide that diploma to the institution to award.

The honest caveat, because the statute is permissive. Section 1 says an institution "may establish" such a program, so not every Indiana public college runs one, and we are not going to tell you yours does. Call the admissions office and ask by name. But a family that has been told its only options are a parent-issued diploma or a high school equivalency test has been told something incomplete.

What to do, in order

• Call the college's admissions office first, not the school district, and ask what it requires from a nonaccredited nonpublic school student. Bring IC 21-43-4-10.
• Ask financial aid about IC 21-43-4-12 by citation, in writing. A tuition waiver on demonstrated financial need is granted by the institution and is not advertised.
• Ask the superintendent about IC 20-33-2-12(b) if you want the district's own dual credit sections, and get the yes in writing before you plan a schedule around it.
• Check the core transfer library for the exact course before you pay. IC 21-43-4-5.2 only helps courses that are on it.
• Write your own approval and your own transcript entry the same week the course starts. In Indiana, you are the school that grants the high school credit, and a record written a year later is a record nobody trusts.

The honest part

Indiana is a light regulation state, and that is a real gift to families who are doing this well. It is also a state that will never once tell you whether it is working.

There is no evaluator, no portfolio review, no annual test, no letter from a superintendent. From the fall your child turns seven until the day they leave your house, the only external checkpoint Indiana creates is a request that will probably never come, for a record that only proves the child was present.

Present is not the same as taught. A parent can keep a flawless attendance log for a year in which a child quietly stopped understanding fractions in October, and the log will be completely accurate and completely silent about it. The state has decided, deliberately, that catching that is your job. Fair enough. But it means the checking has to come from somewhere, and in Indiana that somewhere is you.

How an AI teacher fits into a state like this one

Start with what we are not. Kitchen Table School is not a registered school in Indiana or any other state, we are not an accredited school, and we do not grant credit or a diploma. We do not file your withdrawal form, we are not your school corporation, and we do not administer or score any test. You are the nonaccredited nonpublic school in the eyes of Indiana law, exactly as the statute has it.

What we do is the part between the paperwork. Before anything else, the teacher sits down with your child for a free placement conversation that feels like a friendly chat rather than a test, and tells you where they actually are in each subject, not where the grade label says they should be. From there your child gets a patient teacher working one on one at their real level, kindergarten through twelfth grade. Indiana families take the upload your own curriculum path: you pick the materials, the teacher reads them and teaches from their actual pages, paced across your 180 days.

And every session writes itself down. The date, the subject, the book and unit, how long it ran, what your child worked on, and what they got solid on. Indiana's one authorized request is for an attendance record, and ours prints. Alongside it sit per skill evidence receipts and a portfolio that assembles itself, which is far more than the secretary of education will ever ask for, and much closer to what IDOE means when it strongly recommends keeping good records for the colleges and employers who eventually will.

"Equivalent" is still your word to satisfy. What changes is that you would have something specific to say about it.

Curious how this works day to day once the withdrawal form is signed? Here's the honest guide to teaching your own curriculum with us, written for every out-of-state family, Indiana included. If the ESA is on your mind, our guide to homeschooling a child with an IEP or a learning difference is the companion piece. Or see the requirements for every other state.