OUT-OF-STATE FAMILIES

Montana Homeschool Requirements: The State Deleted Two of Your Duties in 2025, and the Form Your County Hands You Still Prints Both

On May 13, 2025 Montana struck the immunization-records requirement and the building health-and-safety requirement out of the home school half of its homeschool statute, and put home schools in their own subsection for the first time. County notification forms across the state still print the old version, including the parts that are gone. Here is the law as it actually reads today, the four things you owe, and the eleven other places Montana law reaches a homeschooling family.

Montana asks a homeschooling family for very little, and almost everything published about it is a year and a half out of date. We read the enacted act, the current Montana Code Annotated, the administrative rules the statute chases you into, the athletic association's 2026-27 handbook, the Board of Regents' admission policy as revised in July 2026, the Commissioner of Higher Education's own dual enrollment guidelines, four county superintendents' own homeschool packets, and every bill of the 2025 session that touched any of it. This page is for families in Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Bozeman, Butte, Helena, Kalispell, Havre, Anaconda, Miles City and every town and county in Montana.

The short version

What changed on May 13, 2025

Montana's homeschool requirements live in one statute, MCA 20-5-109. Until the spring of 2025, that statute did not distinguish between a nonpublic school and a home school. It opened with one list of requirements that applied to both, and then added one more item that applied only to home schools. That structure was the source of nearly every confusing sentence ever written about homeschooling in Montana, because it meant a family teaching two children at the kitchen table was reading a list drafted for a building full of students.

House Bill 778 of the 69th Legislature fixed that. Its own title says what it did:

AN ACT GENERALLY REVISING REQUIREMENTS REGARDING HOME SCHOOLS; SEPARATING THE REQUIREMENTS FOR HOME SCHOOLS FROM THE REQUIREMENTS FOR NONPUBLIC SCHOOLS; AMENDING SECTION 20-5-109, MCA; AND PROVIDING AN IMMEDIATE EFFECTIVE DATE.

One note on reading it yourself, because we hit a wall and you might too. The Legislature publishes bill texts through its Bill Explorer at bills.legmt.gov, where you search by bill number and session. On the day we published this page, that service and the document service behind it were returning errors for every bill we tried, confirmed in a real browser and not only by a script. We read the enrolled act before the outage and quote it here; if the explorer is still failing when you try it, the statute page linked above carries the current text and names chapter 724 of 2025 in its source note, and the Legislative Services Division can send you the act.

The act is two sections long and the second one is the effective date:

Section 2. Effective date. [This act] is effective on passage and approval.

The Governor signed it on May 13, 2025. It became chapter 724 of the Laws of Montana, and the source note under the statute today reads:

En. Sec. 2, Ch. 355, L. 1983; amd. Sec. 3, Ch. 498, L. 1989; amd. Sec. 9, Ch. 138, L. 2005; amd. Sec. 1, Ch. 724, L. 2025.

Because this is an amending act, the enrolled bill prints the old text and the new text together, with the deletions struck through and the additions underlined. That format is the reason this page can be specific rather than vague, and it is also the reason we quote the deleted clauses one at a time rather than as a continuous passage. Two clauses came out of the home school requirements.

The first was the immunization-records duty. The old combined list required a nonpublic or home school to keep records on pupil attendance and disease immunization:

shall maintain records on pupil attendance and disease immunization and make the records available to the county superintendent of schools on request

That sentence survives, word for word, as the nonpublic school duty at subsection (1)(a). The home school version at subsection (2)(b) is the same sentence with the immunization words taken out.

The second was the building. The old combined list required that the school:

must be housed in a building that complies with applicable local health and safety regulations

That clause also survives for nonpublic schools, at subsection (1)(c). It appears nowhere in the home school subsection. Jefferson County's superintendent of schools describes the change on its own website in one sentence that is worth reading because a public official wrote it, not us:

It removes the requirement regarding housing compliance with applicable health and safety regulations, which is intended for school buildings.

Two things are worth saying about the vote, because a family reading this in a state where homeschooling is a fight will want to know how contested it was. On third reading the House passed HB 778 by 99 to 0 with one member absent, and the Senate concurred 50 to 0. It was introduced by four representatives and nobody recorded a vote against it at any stage after second reading. This was not a narrow win. It was a housekeeping fix that everyone agreed was overdue.

The whole law, and it really is this short

Here is what a Montana home school owes, in the statute's own words, quoted one clause at a time because the statute prints them as an outline. To qualify its students for exemption from compulsory enrollment, a home school:

That is the list. There is no test, no portfolio, no evaluation, no annual report of progress, no curriculum approval, no home visit, no minimum education for the teaching parent, and no requirement that your school year match anybody's calendar.

The companion statute, MCA 20-5-111, is the sentence that does the real work, and most Montana families have never read it. Subject to 20-5-109, it says a parent has the authority to instruct their child in a home school and is solely responsible for four things:

Read that fourth one again. The evaluation of the home school instruction is the parent's job, exclusively, as a matter of Montana statute. When a county official, a district, or a well-meaning relative asks how you know your child is on track, that clause is the answer to who gets to decide. It has been in the code since 1991.

Finally, the definition. MCA 20-5-102, the compulsory enrollment statute, excuses a child who is:

enrolled in a nonpublic or home school that complies with the provisions of 20-5-109

and then defines the term for that purpose:

a home school is the instruction by a parent of the parent's child, stepchild, or ward in the parent's residence and a nonpublic school includes a parochial, church, religious, or private school

Two categories, separately defined, in the same sentence. Hold on to that distinction. It decides the tax-credit scholarship question later on this page, and it is probably what decides the federal 529 question too.

The form your county hands you is probably still the old one

Montana does not administer homeschooling from Helena. There is no state homeschool office, no state form, and no state registry. The filing goes to your county superintendent of schools, an elected county official, and Montana has fifty-six counties. Each office produces its own notification form and its own packet, and that is where the 2025 amendment has not landed.

We pulled four counties' current materials on September 17, 2026, sixteen months after HB 778 took effect. Here is what we found, named, because a family should be able to check us.

Flathead County. The county's homeschool page was last updated on July 13, 2026. The notification form it offers is a fillable PDF you complete and email back, and at the bottom of the page you sign, it reproduces the statute. Not the current statute. The version it prints includes, as item (1) of the requirements for a nonpublic or home school:

maintain records on pupil attendance and disease immunization and make records available to the County Superintendent on request;

and as item (3):

be housed in a building that complies with applicable local health and safety regulations;

The citation history printed under it ends in 1989. The same county distributes a home school packet whose cover letter tells parents that the mandatory information they must provide includes immunization records in the first year of homeschooling, and an attendance report submitted each semester or yearly. The packet itself says where its statutes came from:

The statutes that follow may also be found in the 2017 MCA and have been in effect for many years.

Lake County. The county's homeschool page prints the requirements in prose, and it is the pre-2025 list, including that a nonpublic homeschool shall maintain records on pupil attendance and disease immunization, and be housed in a building that complies with applicable health and safety regulations.

Blaine County. The packet posted on the county's site reproduces the full pre-2025 statutory text twice, in both cases with the immunization clause and the building clause intact.

Jefferson County is the interesting one, and it is interesting because it is right and wrong on the same page. Near the top, the county explains HB 778 accurately, in the sentence we quoted above about the building requirement, and in this one:

It eliminates the requirement for homeschooling families to maintain immunization records and make them available to county superintendents.

Scroll down the same page and you reach a list of what a Montana homeschooling family must do, which tells the reader in bold that they must keep attendance and immunization records, and that they must also keep a record of their child's disease immunizations or an exemption from them. Scroll further and the page reprints the pre-2025 statute in full, with both deleted clauses in place.

What to do with this, and it is not an argument. Your county superintendent is a local official doing a job with a small staff, and a packet that has not been rewritten since 2017 is an ordinary workload problem, not a conspiracy. Three practical points:

Immunization: where the duty actually sits now, and the one thing that puts it back

Since the words came out of 20-5-109, the natural next question is whether some other statute picks them up. We read the whole of Montana's school immunization law, MCA Title 20, chapter 5, part 4, to find out. Every duty in it runs to the same party. The record-keeping section says:

The governing authority of each school shall require written evidence of each pupil's immunization against the diseases listed in 20-5-403 and shall record the immunization status, including any exemptions, of each pupil as part of the pupil's permanent school record.

The attendance bar says:

The governing authority of any school other than a postsecondary school may not allow a person to attend as a pupil unless the person:

and the definitions section defines a governing authority as the board of trustees of a school district or the administrator of a private school, preschool, or postsecondary school. The enforcement section requires the governing authority to prohibit further attendance by a conditionally admitted pupil who has not been immunized. And the injunction section, which is the only place a parent appears, is triggered when a minor is excluded from school and it closes with a sentence that limits everything above it:

Injunction is the exclusive remedy for failure to take any of the actions referred to in subsection (1).

So every mechanism in the chapter is keyed to attendance at a school, enforced by that school's governing authority, against a pupil attending it. The only sentence in Montana law that ever attached an immunization record duty to a family teaching at home was the one HB 778 struck out. We are not going to tell you that means no county official will ever ask, because 20-5-109(2)(b) still lets them ask for your attendance records and packets get stapled together. We are telling you what the statutes say and who they command, so you can have the conversation with the citation in hand.

And here is the part that matters more than the argument. The moment your child enrolls in a public school, including part-time under the right described in the next section, they are attending as a pupil, the district is the governing authority, and the immunization statute attaches to that attendance in the ordinary way. A family that signs a ninth grader up for a single band class has stepped back inside the chapter. Whether participation in an extracurricular activity alone, without any enrollment, has the same effect is a question the statutes do not answer in terms, and we are not going to answer it for you. Ask the district in writing before the season, and keep the reply.

The hours, and they are real numbers

The third home school duty points at MCA 20-1-301, which sets the minimum aggregate hours for a school fiscal year running July 1 to June 30. Montana counts hours, not days, which is unusually friendly to a family that schools four long days a week or year round.

And one relief valve most people miss, in the same section:

At least the minimum aggregate hours required in subsection (2) must be conducted during each school fiscal year, except that 1,050 aggregate hours of pupil instruction for graduating seniors may be sufficient.

1,080 hours across a 180-day year is six hours a day. Across a 40-week year at four days a week it is about 6.75 hours a day. Across 48 weeks at four days it is 5.6. The statute does not care which shape you pick, because 20-5-111 makes the time, place, and method of instruction yours alone.

One honest note on the same section, because it is the sort of thing that gets repeated wrongly. The statute also says the minimum hours are not required for a pupil demonstrating proficiency under 20-9-311(4)(d), and it sets a funding penalty for districts that fall short. Both of those clauses speak to school districts and to the state's per-pupil funding formula. Neither has a home school anywhere in it. We would not build a plan around the proficiency exception as a homeschooling family.

The subject question, chased all the way to the end

This is the one nobody finishes, and we think it is the most useful piece of research on this page after the 2025 amendment itself.

The fourth home school duty is an organized course of study including the subjects required of public schools as a basic instructional program pursuant to 20-7-111. So what are those subjects? MCA 20-7-111 does not say. It delegates:

the board of public education shall define and specify the basic instructional program for pupils in public schools, and this program must be set forth in the standards of accreditation

The Board of Public Education did that in a rule, and the rule that connects it to your family is ARM 10.65.301, which has been in force, unamended, since January 1, 1982. It says:

The Board of Public Education had designated as the basic instructional program the educational curriculum set forth in the Administrative Rules of Montana 10.55.402 and 10.55.403 as amended for application to private institutions.

ARM 10.55.402 and 10.55.403 are not current rule numbers. We searched the Administrative Rules of Montana for both, on September 17, 2026, and the only live rules that mention them are 10.65.301 itself and the attendance officer rule next to it. Everything else the search returned was a Montana Administrative Register issue from the 1980s. The basic education program rules now live in subchapter 10.55.9, Academic Requirements, and they were last amended effective July 1, 2023.

So here is the actual answer, three hops down from the statute your county's form quotes at you.

For elementary, ARM 10.55.901 no longer lists subjects at all. As amended in 2023 it requires an education program aligned to the program area standards that enables students to meet the content standards, and adds:

Instruction in reading literacy and writing literacy shall be incorporated into all required and elective program areas as required in the Montana Content Standards.

For high school, ARM 10.55.904 is where the numbers are:

The basic education program, aligned to the program area standards, for grades 9 through 12 shall be at least 20 units of coursework that enable all students to meet the content standards and content-specific grade-level or grade-band learning progressions and recognizes the distinct and unique cultural heritages of American Indians.

Then the list, under a heading whose exact wording matters more than anything else in this section. The rule says minimum offerings shall include at least 4 units of English language arts; 3 units of mathematics; 3 units of science; 3 units of social studies including half a unit of civics or government; 2 units of career and technical education; 2 units of arts; 1 unit of health and physical education; 2 units of world languages; 2 units of electives; and half a unit of economics or financial literacy folded into the social studies, mathematics, or career and technical units.

We are not going to tell you that a Montana homeschooling family must teach two units of world languages. That list is written as what an accredited high school must offer across its catalogue, in a rule whose subject is school accreditation, reached through a 1982 rule that points at two rule numbers which no longer exist. Whether "the subjects required of public schools as a basic instructional program" means the catalogue a district must publish or the coursework a student must complete is a real question of statutory interpretation, and the honest answer is that no Montana authority we could find has ever answered it in writing for a home school.

What we will tell you is what to do about it, which is more useful than a verdict:

What happens if you skip the notice

Montana's homeschool freedoms all hang off one conditional phrase: a child is excused from compulsory enrollment if enrolled in a home school that complies with the provisions of 20-5-109. The first of those provisions is the annual notice. So the notice is not paperwork for its own sake; it is the thing that makes the rest legal.

Follow the chain if you skip it. MCA 20-5-103 requires attendance for a child 7 or older until the later of their sixteenth birthday or completing eighth grade, except where the child has been excused under 20-5-102. MCA 20-5-106 then defines truancy by reference to 20-5-103 and lays out what follows: the attendance officer may notify you, may require a meeting to formulate a truancy plan, and may refer the matter to a prosecuting attorney. If convicted:

the person shall be fined not more than $100, ordered to perform up to 20 hours of community service, or required to give bond in the penal sum of $100, with sureties, conditioned on the person's agreement to cooperate with the district in implementing the truancy plan provided for in subsection (2) for the remainder of the current school term

Failure to comply with that court order carries up to three days in the county jail. And there is a count that turns it into a juvenile matter:

If the child is discovered by the attendance officer to be truant on 9 or more days or 54 or more parts of a day in 1 school year, the child may be referred to youth court as habitually truant under Title 41, chapter 5.

Lake County's own letter to homeschooling parents says the practical version out loud, and we quote it because it is a county official describing what their office actually does:

If your child is not enrolled at the public school where you reside and there is no notification form in our office within this time period, your child would be considered truant, and the District of Residence will proceed appropriately.

None of this is a reason to be nervous. It is a reason to file the notice in August, keep the copy, and never think about it again. Several counties ask for it by mid-September; the statute itself says only in each school fiscal year, which runs July 1 to June 30, and 20-5-102 separately points at the first week of the school term for enrollment generally. File early and the question does not arise.

Part-time public school is a duty your trustees owe you, not a favour they grant

This is the single most under-reported fact about homeschooling in Montana, and it has been law since July 1, 2023.

House Bill 396 of the 68th Legislature, chapter 617, is titled, in part, REQUIRING TRUSTEES TO ADMIT RESIDENT SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN ON A PART-TIME BASIS AT THE PARENT'S REQUEST. It added two subsections to MCA 20-5-101. The first is the right:

The trustees shall assign and admit a child who is enrolled in a nonpublic or home school and who meets the requirements of subsection (1) as a part-time enrollee at the request of the child's parent or guardian.

The second defines the term, and this is the half that explains why the first one exists. A part-time enrollee means:

a qualifying pupil who is enrolled and admitted at one of the fractional levels that qualify for part-time ANB pursuant to 20-9-311(4)(a) or (4)(d)

ANB is average number belonging, Montana's per-pupil funding count. MCA 20-9-311(4)(a) converts hours into fractions of a pupil: 180 to 359 aggregate hours a year is quarter-time, 360 to 539 is half-time, 540 to 719 is three-quarter-time, and 720 or more is full-time. The same act put the word shall in the admission sentence and pointed it at the funding table, which means the Legislature answered the unspoken objection at the same time it created the right. Your district is not being asked to educate your child for free.

The same session's amendment to 20-5-102 added the plain-language version to the compulsory enrollment statute:

A child enrolled in a nonpublic or home school may enroll on a part-time basis in a public school.

Three practical notes. The right runs to a child who meets 20-5-101(1), meaning at least five on or before September 10, not yet nineteen, and a resident of the district. Enrollment is enrollment, so everything that attaches to a public school pupil attaches for those hours, including the immunization chapter described above. And whether a particular course is available in a particular period is a scheduling question your principal really does control; the statute guarantees admission as a part-time enrollee, not a seat in a specific section. Ask early, ask in writing, and ask for a named course.

Sports and activities: open by statute, and the statute protects you from the test

Montana's participation statute is MCA 20-5-112, enacted in 2021 and amended in 2025. The operative sentence bars both the district and the association:

a school district or an athletic association, conference, or organization with authority over interscholastic sports may not prohibit or restrict the ability of a student attending a nonpublic or home school meeting the requirements of 20-5-109 from participating in extracurricular activities at a school in the student's resident school district solely on the student's enrollment at the public school or on the number of hours the student physically attends the public school

Read the last twenty words twice, because they are doing the work. The association's ordinary rule requires enrollment and physical presence. The statute says neither of those can be the reason you are turned away.

What 2025 changed. Senate Bill 350, chapter 603, effective on passage, added an exception. Its title says exactly what it does; it is an act ALLOWING SCHOOL DISTRICTS OR ATHLETIC ORGANIZATIONS TO RESTRICT EXTRACURRICULAR PARTICIPATION OF HOME SCHOOL STUDENTS WHO ARE NOT CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OR RESIDENTS OF MONTANA. The new subsection permits a restriction based on the student's status as a United States citizen and the student's status as a Montana resident, as determined under 1-1-215. For a Montana family homeschooling a Montana child, nothing changed. For anyone else, that is the gate.

And the sentence nobody else prints. Subsection (3)(b) says how academic eligibility gets established for a home school student:

The academic eligibility for extracurricular participation for a student attending a home school must be attested in writing by the educator providing the student instruction with verification by the school principal. The verification may not include any form of student assessment.

In most states we have written up, the athletic association is the body that quietly imposes a test on a homeschooling family. Montana's Legislature wrote the opposite into the statute. The principal verifies the attestation; the principal may not test your child to do it. If you are told your child has to sit a placement exam to play, that sentence is your answer, and it is one sentence long.

Then read the association's handbook, because the price is a record the state never asked you for

The Montana High School Association 2026-27 Handbook implements the statute in Section 2, Eligibility, as Exception 3 to the enrollment rule. It opens by saying non-public or home school students who meet the requirements of 20-5-109 can participate in MHSA member school extracurricular activities, and then stipulates. The first stipulation is the reconciliation with the statute, and it is the parenthesis that matters:

The same standards for participation must be met as those required of full-time students enrolled in the school (besides enrollment).

The handbook also carries the 2025 amendment: for a homeschool student to participate in MHSA sports or activities, the student must be a United States citizen and a Montana resident under 1-1-215. And it adds two limits that are not in the statute at all. One is a place rule, that the student may only participate in the school in the student's attendance area and cannot transfer, with an interpretation printed underneath saying homeschool or nonpublic students must reside with their parents or guardians for the rule to apply. The other is in Rule 2.7, which bars concurrent eligibility at two member schools and then says a home school or nonpublic school student who participates at an MHSA member school is not eligible to concurrently participate in the same sport or activity that they participate in at the member school in any other league. If your child plays on a homeschool league team, that sentence is worth reading before signing up for a school team in the same sport.

Now the academic half, and this is the hidden obligation. The handbook's Exception 3 says that for a home school student, academic eligibility includes provisions 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4. Rule 2.2 defines a grading period as one semester, roughly 18 school weeks or 90 school days. Rules 2.3 and 2.4 are the substance. Rule 2.4 reads:

A student must have received a passing grade and received credit in at least twenty periods of prepared work per week or its equivalent during the last preceding semester in which he/she was enrolled.

And Rule 2.5 closes the door on fixing it later. It says that a student assigned an incomplete or a condition in a subject has not received a passing grade in that subject, and then, in six words:

The record at the end of the semester is final.

Put the two halves of Montana law side by side. The state requires a homeschooling parent to keep attendance records and nothing else, leaves evaluation solely to the parent, and forbids the principal from assessing the child. The athletic association requires passing grades and credit in twenty periods of prepared work per week, for the last completed semester, attested in writing by the parent. Those grades have to have existed while the semester was happening. A parent who has never issued a grade cannot honestly attest to one in August.

This is not a trap the association set. It is the ordinary rule that every student meets, applied to a family the state exempted from grading. But it lands in the fall of ninth grade, on a family that has been told for eight years that Montana asks nothing, and the only way to be ready for it is to have started keeping a semester record before you knew you needed one.

And your district gets paid for it

Most states, when a homeschooling family asks for access, run into an unspoken cost objection. Montana has already answered it twice. The part-time enrollment right above carries fractional ANB. And MCA 20-9-311(12) pays a district for the activity alone. A district may include in its October and February enrollment counts an individual who is otherwise eligible and who, during the prior school year:

That describes a homeschooled child almost word for word. The rate is in the next subsection:

each completed extracurricular activity under subsection (12)(a) may be counted as one-sixteenth enrollment for the individual

with an eighth for an activity lasting longer than eighteen weeks, and the individual capped at one full-time enrollment across all of them. The statute defines an extracurricular activity for this purpose as an MHSA-sanctioned sport or activity, an approved career and technical student organization under 20-7-306, or a school theater production.

You will not be handed a cheque. This is a line in the district's funding formula, not a payment to you. But when a school tells you that including your child is a burden, the answer is that the Legislature already decided otherwise and wrote a rate into the code. One honest counterweight, from the same statute: subsection (9)(d) says nothing in that subsection may be construed to require a school district to offer access to activities governed by the association to a pupil who is not otherwise eligible under the rules of the association. The money does not override the handbook. Both apply.

College credit in high school: the first six credits are free, and you are named

Montana's dual enrollment answer for homeschoolers is better than most states' and it is documented in unusual detail, which is fortunate, because the statute alone would have told you the opposite.

The statutory route closes on the district. MCA 20-9-706, the Running Start program, lets a school district enter an interlocal agreement with a postsecondary institution to let 11th and 12th grade students, as defined by the district, take college classes. To participate, a student completes a running start application provided by the district, and the district decides whether the student has the skills needed. Every gate in that sentence is a district gate. Read alone, it would close.

The university system opened it anyway, and put homeschoolers in the definition. The Commissioner's Directive on Early College Student Tuition, effective March 14, 2014 and updated March 3, 2020, defines an early college student as:

A student who has not yet graduated from high school but has been admitted to earn college credit while attending a Montana high school (including MT residents that are home schooled, in middle school, or traditional high school age students enrolled in GED programs).

The price, from the same directive:

The tuition amount will be 50% of the Resident 2-year tuition rate (or 50% of lower division undergraduate rate at MSUN and UMW). Mandatory and non-mandatory fees will not be assessed, except for applicable course fees.

And the free part:

Beginning Fall 2018, high school students will receive the first two lower-division courses (6 credits) tuition-free.

The Operational Guidelines for Dual Enrollment, updated June 2023, work it out in practice. The eligibility section says a student must be enrolled in a Montana school district, and then immediately carves you out:

Homeschool students may enroll in college credit-only courses through the college, or concurrent enrollment courses through their local high school.

Two routes, and they are different. The college route you arrange with the campus directly. The concurrent enrollment route goes through the high school, which is where 20-5-101(8)'s part-time admission right becomes the bridge rather than a separate topic.

The guidelines also carry the sort of operational detail that normally only turns up after a family has already been turned away once.

Getting into a Montana college, and the scholarship that is closed

Board of Regents Policy 301, last revised July 9, 2026, is the admission rule. Its first paragraph requires graduation from a high school accredited by a state accrediting agency, or a high school equivalency assessment designated by the Board of Public Education, and then adds the homeschool provision. At the discretion of the institution, for students who complete their secondary education through home schooling or at unaccredited secondary schools, the requirement may be met by satisfactory performance on the ACT, SAT, GED, or HiSET.

Two honest observations about that sentence, in your favour and against it. In your favour: the two-year campuses and some two-year programs of the four-year campuses are open admission, where that paragraph is the only academic requirement. Against it: at the discretion of the institution and satisfactory performance are both undefined in the policy, so the answer for your child at your campus is a campus answer, and you should get it in writing from that admissions office before eleventh grade, not after.

For full admission to a four-year program, Policy 301 requires the Regents' College Preparatory Program, four years of English, three of mathematics through Algebra II, three of social studies, two of laboratory science, and two more from foreign language, computer science, arts, or approved career and technical education, plus separate demonstrations of mathematics proficiency, writing proficiency, and general preparation. Look at how those three demonstrations can be satisfied, because it decides what you should be doing in ninth grade. Each one can be met by a test score, and each one can also be met by a cumulative high school grade point average: 3.0 or higher, or 2.5 with a qualifying course grade. A cumulative GPA is arithmetic over grades that were issued as the work happened. Montana never asked you to issue a single one.

And the state's flagship merit scholarship is closed, in one sentence with no homeschool exception. The MUS Honor Scholarship eligibility criteria, revised August 5, 2024, say:

Prospective recipients must graduate from a Montana high school accredited by the Montana State Board of Public Education and have been enrolled full time and in attendance in a Montana accredited high school for at least three years prior to graduation.

The document provides exactly one exception, for students who did not attend an accredited Montana high school because they lived with a parent stationed outside Montana on active duty. Selection then runs off class ranking certified by a high school principal. There is no route through it for a homeschooled Montana graduate, and we would rather tell you that eight years early than have you find out in March of twelfth grade. Worth knowing alongside it: the dual enrollment directive says early college students are not eligible for Board Designated Tuition Waivers, and lists the MUS Honor Scholarship first among them.

Two things this does not close. Federal aid, which runs on the FAFSA and does not require an accredited diploma. And admission itself, which Policy 301 expressly provides for. Plan for the ACT or SAT, start a real transcript with real grades in ninth grade, and ask each campus what satisfactory performance means to them.

The money, and the one clause that decides most of it

Montana has three education money programs a homeschooling family will hear about. They reach you very differently, and one of them names you as excluded.

The tax-credit scholarship: closed to home schools, by name

Montana's Tax Credit for Qualified Education Contributions lets a taxpayer donate to a certified student scholarship organization and take a dollar-for-dollar credit up to $200,000, against an aggregate statewide cap. The scholarships go to eligible students to enroll with a qualified education provider, and that term is defined in five parts. The third part is one line:

is not a home school as referred to in 20-5-102(2)(e)

That is the cross-reference we flagged at the top of this page: 20-5-102(2)(e) is the sentence that defines a home school as instruction by a parent, in the parent's residence, and defines a nonpublic school separately. The Legislature used that distinction to exclude the family's own home school from the program by name.

Two follow-on points, because the exclusion is narrower than it first looks and the second gate is wider than the first.

The definition also reaches a nonaccredited provider or tutor, so long as the provider tells the parents in writing at the time of enrollment that it is not accredited and is not seeking accreditation. So the statute contemplates a scholarship being spent with something other than an accredited private school. But the last part of the definition is the real gate:

qualifies for an exemption from compulsory enrollment under 20-5-102(2)(e) and 20-5-109

After HB 778, 20-5-109 has two subsections, and the one that applies to a school rather than a family is subsection (1), which still requires attendance and immunization records, minimum aggregate hours, an organized course of study, and a building that complies with local health and safety regulations. The 2025 separation of home schools from nonpublic schools therefore did something beyond tidying: it sharpened which half of the statute every cross-reference in the rest of the code now lands on.

Whether a monthly online teaching service like ours could ever be a qualified education provider in Montana, we are not going to tell you. We sell the thing being asked about, and a confident answer from a company that profits from the answer is worth nothing. The doors are the nonaccredited-provider clause and the tutor clause. The obstacles are the building requirement, the health and safety requirement, and the flat exclusion of a home school. The office to ask is the Montana Department of Revenue, which certifies the scholarship organizations under 15-30-3103, and the question should go in writing and the answer should be kept. Note also that this entire part of the code carries a termination date of December 31, 2029.

The special needs education savings account: open, and the gate is last school year

The Montana Special Needs Equal Opportunity Education Savings Account, created in 2023 and amended in 2025, works completely differently. It reimburses parents directly for allowable educational resources, from an account administered by the Office of Public Instruction, funded out of the resident district's share of the state's per-pupil money.

Who qualifies. A qualified student is a Montana resident who, in the current school year, is identified as a child with a disability under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and is between 5 and 19 on September 10. Then comes the gate. The student must also fall into one of four categories, and the ordinary one is this:

was counted during the previous school year for purposes of school district ANB funding

The other three are narrow: enrolled last year in a Department of Corrections program or the Montana School for the Deaf and Blind, not a Montana resident last year, or eligible to enter kindergarten. So the ordinary way into this program is to have been counted in a district's funding formula last year, which for most families means the child was in public school. A family that has homeschooled a disabled child for several years is outside all four categories as the statute is written.

There is an open question here we are going to hand you rather than answer, because it is worth real money and nobody has published it. The extracurricular ANB provision described earlier lets a district include in its enrollment count a child who was not enrolled last year and completed an activity of at least six weeks. Whether a child counted that way was "counted during the previous school year for purposes of school district ANB funding" for the purposes of the ESA eligibility clause is a question the two statutes do not answer about each other. They do not cross-reference. If your child has a disability and you are weighing whether the ESA is reachable, that is the exact question to put, in writing, to the Office of Public Instruction, and to keep the reply.

What it buys, if you are in. The allowable resources list at 20-7-1704 is long and it is written in a way that reaches a homeschooling family. It includes curriculum and supplemental materials, tutoring, educational therapies from licensed practitioners, assessment tests, services provided by a public school including individual classes and extracurricular activities, postsecondary tuition and books, and:

an educational program or course using electronic or offsite delivery methods, including but not limited to tutoring, distance learning programs, online programs, and technology delivered learning programs

And the sentence that makes it usable without enrolling anywhere:

Nothing in this part may be construed to require that a qualified student must be enrolled, full-time or part-time, in either a private school or nonpublic online school.

Same refusal as above: whether our service is an allowable resource under that clause is the superintendent of public instruction's call, not ours, and the statute gives the superintendent an explicit catch-all for any other educational expense they approve. Ask in writing.

And the cost, which is not money. The contract a parent signs under 20-7-1705 requires the parent to:

release the resident school district from all obligations to educate the qualified student, including any requirements that the district provide a free and appropriate education to the qualified student or develop an individualized education program for the qualified student

That is a real trade and it deserves a real decision. For a family that has already concluded the district cannot serve their child, releasing an obligation that was not being met costs nothing and the money is a gain. For a family still receiving services under an IEP, it is the whole ballgame. We are not going to tell you which one you are; we are going to tell you that the release is in the contract and that you should read it before you sign it. We have not printed a dollar figure for the account either, because the statute sets the amount by a formula built out of four separate per-pupil rates rather than a published number, and any figure we invented would be wrong for your district.

529 money: the state deduction just went up, and there is a one-year trap

House Bill 845 of 2025, chapter 734, raised Montana's income tax deduction for contributions to a 529 account. It is effective on passage and applies retroactively to tax years beginning after December 31, 2024. The old figure was $3,000; the act replaces it with $4,500 for an individual, head of household, or married taxpayer filing separately, and $9,000 for married taxpayers filing a joint return, with an inflation adjustment for each tax year after 2025 computed against June 2024.

Now the part nobody publishes. Montana has a recapture tax on 529 withdrawals, at the highest individual income tax rate, and MCA 15-62-208 defines the withdrawals it applies to in a way that catches perfectly ordinary ones. A recapturable withdrawal means a withdrawal or distribution that is a nonqualified withdrawal, or a withdrawal or distribution from an account that was opened after the date that is one year prior to the date of the withdrawal.

Read that second limb slowly. Open a 529 in August to pay for curriculum, withdraw from it in September, and Montana recaptures the deduction at the top rate even if the withdrawal was entirely qualified. The statute also presumes that every contribution made by a Montana resident reduced their Montana taxes unless the contributor can demonstrate otherwise. If a 529 is part of your plan, open the account at least a full year before you intend to spend from it. That is the whole fix and it costs nothing but timing.

Whether homeschool expenses are qualified at all, we are refusing to answer, and here is why. Montana's 529 chapter defines qualified education expenses as any expense permitted by section 529 of the Internal Revenue Code, so the state question is really the federal question. Federal section 529(c)(7), as expanded, lists exactly the things a homeschooling family buys: curriculum and curricular materials, books, online educational materials, tuition for outside tutoring by an unrelated licensed teacher or subject matter expert, standardized test fees, dual enrollment fees. Then read the scoping phrase that governs the entire list. Those expenses count only when incurred:

in connection with enrollment or attendance at, or for students enrolled at or attending, an elementary or secondary public, private, or religious school

The words home school appear nowhere in section 529. We read the whole section to confirm it, and they appear nowhere in section 530, the Coverdell provision, either. What section 530 does contain is the definition that hands the question back to your state: a school means any school which provides elementary education or secondary education, kindergarten through grade 12, as determined under State law.

And Montana state law, since 20-5-102(2)(e) and since HB 778 sharpened it, treats a home school and a nonpublic school as two different things in two different subsections. We are not going to tell you how that resolves, because we sell education services and we are not your tax advisor. Take those two sentences to the Montana Department of Revenue or to a CPA, ask the question in writing, and keep the answer. Never act on the widely circulated line that 529 money now covers homeschool expenses; the expense list does, and the scoping sentence is the whole question.

The statute nobody opens, because it is filed under family law

Montana has a parental rights act, at MCA 40-6-701, enacted in 2021 and amended in each session since. It is in Title 40, Family Law, which is why homeschool guides never cite it. It opens with a strict-scrutiny standard:

A government entity may not interfere with the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing, education, health care, and mental health of their children unless the government entity demonstrates that the interference:

and then requires that the interference furthers a compelling governmental interest and is narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means available. Its list of reserved rights names your choice in its own text:

direct the education of the child, including the right to choose public, private, religious, or home schools and the right to make reasonable choices with public schools for the education of the child

It defines a government entity to include a school district. It defines a substantial burden to include exclusion from a government program. And it has teeth that most rights statutes do not:

The prevailing party in an action filed pursuant to 40-6-702, 40-6-707, 41-1-402, 41-1-403, 41-1-405, and this section is entitled to reasonable attorney fees and costs.

What this is and what it is not. It is not a guarantee that any particular district decision is unlawful. Compelling interest and narrow tailoring are legal tests decided by courts on facts, we are not lawyers, and nothing on this page is legal advice. What it is, practically, is a reason to put your request in writing and keep the answer in writing. A district that has to explain in an email why a Montana statute's part-time admission duty does not apply to your child is having a different conversation than one that says no on the phone. Build the record first. The statute is there if you ever need it.

Two federal questions, and we will answer one of them

The military question has a real answer, and it is not a state answer. Education agencies in several states tell homeschooling families that the armed forces will not accept their transcript. The governing text is section 532 of Public Law 112-81, set out in the notes to 10 U.S.C. 503, titled Equal Treatment for Secondary School Graduates. It requires a military department, for recruitment and enlistment purposes, to treat a covered graduate the same as a graduate of a secondary school, and defines a covered graduate as a person who receives a diploma from a secondary school that is legally operating, or who:

otherwise completes a program of secondary education in compliance with the education laws of the State in which the person resides

That statute settles the tier your child is placed in. It does not settle what a particular recruiting station accepts as proof, which is a station-level determination, and we found no document that does. Ask the recruiter, in writing, before twelfth grade.

And notice the hinge, because it makes the whole page one instruction rather than twelve. The federal test is compliance with your state's education laws. In Montana, the documentary evidence of that compliance is your annual notice to the county superintendent and your attendance record. The same two pieces of paper, kept for twelve years, are what evidence enlistment eligibility, and they are the same filing habit the 529 question, the college admissions question, and the athletic eligibility question all end up asking about in different words.

The 529 question we have refused above, and we have printed the two sentences that decide it so you can take them to somebody qualified.

What the 2025 Legislature did, and what is already being drafted for 2027

Montana's Legislature meets in regular session in odd-numbered years. The 69th Legislature sat in 2025 and adjourned in the spring; there was no 2026 regular session, which means nothing has changed since May 2025 and nothing can change until the 70th Legislature convenes in January 2027. That makes this page unusually stable, and it makes the counterweight unusually easy to state precisely.

We pulled every bill of the 2025 session from the Legislature's own bill service and read the short title of all 4,495 of them against homeschooling, extracurricular access, compulsory attendance, education savings and scholarship terms. Five relevant acts passed:

And the ones that did not. House Bill 209, which would have provided an income tax credit for nonpublic school expenses such as private or homeschool tuition, died in process in the House. Two legislative-council drafts that would have expanded education savings accounts to all students, and one that would have provided freedom in school choice, died in drafting without ever being introduced. If you have seen a claim that Montana has a universal ESA or a homeschool tuition tax credit, it is describing a bill that did not pass.

For 2027, the drafting has already started, and we can tell you exactly where it stands today. As of September 17, 2026 the Legislature's bill service shows 356 draft requests filed for the 70th Legislature. Screening their short titles for anything touching this page returns one that a homeschooling family should watch: LC0323, whose short title is "Provide for education savings account tax credit" and which had a drafter assigned on September 16, 2026. That is one day old as we publish and it is a draft, not a bill; it has no bill number, no sponsor of record in the file, no text, and no hearing. It may never be introduced. But it is the live one, and the Legislature's own bill explorer is where you check it, because between now and January 2027 that list will get much longer.

Small things Montana families ask

What this actually means for your week

Montana asks a homeschooling family for one letter a year and a column of tally marks. That is genuinely it, and after May 2025 it is less than it was. If you are starting fresh with a seven-year-old and no interest in district programs, you could satisfy Montana law for the next nine years with an August email and a printed grid on the fridge.

Then look at what the rest of this page has in common, because it is one pattern and not eight.

Every one of those wants the same thing: a written record of what was taught and how it went. Montana has removed nearly every reason to keep one for compliance and left every reason to want one as evidence. That is the awkward position a family in a low-regulation state is most likely to be caught out by, because nothing on the calendar reminds you.

That is what we built. Mrs. M teaches your child the four core subjects one on one, at their level, and keeps a record of every session as a byproduct of doing it: which subject, which lesson, what your child worked on, how they did. If you upload a curriculum you already bought, she teaches from its actual pages and the record says so. When a Montana principal asks what the last semester looked like, or an admissions office asks for a transcript, or a county superintendent asks for your attendance records, the answer is already written down, because writing it down was never a separate job.

We do not promise your child will hit any particular mark, in Montana or anywhere else. Nobody honest does. What we will say is that a state that asks for almost nothing is a gift, and the difference between a gift and a trap is whether anything got written down along the way.

This is general information for Montana families researching homeschool law, current as of publication on September 17, 2026, and it is not legal, tax, special education or financial aid advice for your situation. Statutory text is quoted from the Montana Code Annotated 2025 as published by the Montana Legislature, specifically MCA 20-5-101, 20-5-102, 20-5-103, 20-5-105, 20-5-106, 20-5-109, 20-5-110, 20-5-111 and 20-5-112; 20-5-402, 20-5-403, 20-5-405, 20-5-406, 20-5-408 and 20-5-409; 20-1-301 and 20-1-302; 20-7-111; 20-9-311 and 20-9-706; 20-7-1703, 20-7-1704, 20-7-1705 and 20-7-1709; 15-30-3102 and 15-30-3111; 15-62-103 and 15-62-208; and 40-6-701 and 40-6-703. Session material is quoted from the enrolled versions of 2025 House Bill 778 (chapter 724, effective on passage, signed May 13, 2025), 2025 Senate Bill 350 (chapter 603), 2025 Senate Bill 486 (chapter 408), 2025 Senate Bill 253 (chapter 592), 2025 House Bill 845 (chapter 734) and 2023 House Bill 396 (chapter 617, effective July 1, 2023), all read from the Legislature's own document service before that service began returning HTTP 500 errors on the afternoon of publication; the acts are not hyperlinked on this page for that reason, and the statutes they amended are linked instead. Vote tallies, bill dispositions, chapter numbers and effective dates for the 2025 session, and the count of 2027 draft requests, are taken from the Montana Legislature's public bill service at api.legmt.gov, read on September 17, 2026. Administrative rules are quoted from the Administrative Rules of Montana as published by the Secretary of State, specifically ARM 10.65.301, 10.55.901, 10.55.902 and 10.55.904, all read on September 17, 2026. County material is quoted from the Flathead County Superintendent of Schools' home school notification form and home school packet as linked from that office's homeschool page, from the Lake County Superintendent of Schools' homeschool page, from the Jefferson County Superintendent of Schools' page, and from the Blaine County Superintendent of Schools' homeschool packet. Athletic rules are quoted from the Montana High School Association 2026-27 Handbook, Section 2 Eligibility, as posted on the association's own handbook page. Higher education material is quoted from Montana Board of Regents Policy 301, revised July 9, 2026, from the Commissioner's Directive on Early College Student Tuition and Ineligibility for Board Designated Waivers, effective March 14, 2014 and updated March 3, 2020, from the Operational Guidelines for Dual Enrollment updated June 2023, and from the MUS Honor Scholarship Eligibility Criteria and Procedures, revision date August 5, 2024. Federal material is quoted from 26 U.S.C. sections 529 and 530 and from section 532 of Public Law 112-81 as set out in the notes to 10 U.S.C. 503, all re-fetched from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel on September 17, 2026. Seven sourcing notes we owe you. First, the deleted clauses of MCA 20-5-109 are quoted individually rather than as a continuous passage, because the enrolled act interleaves struck and added text and a block quotation would misstate what is contiguous in the source. Second, we have not printed a dollar amount for the special needs education savings account, because the statute sets it by a formula built from four separate per-pupil rates rather than a published figure. Third, we have declined to say whether a Montana home school program is a school for federal 529 or Coverdell purposes, and have quoted the two scoping provisions that decide it instead. Fourth, we have declined to say whether our own service could be a qualified education provider under the tax-credit scholarship or an allowable resource under the education savings account, because we profit from the answer, and have named the offices to ask. Fifth, we have declined to say how many units of coursework Montana's basic instructional program requires of a home school, because the rule reached through ARM 10.65.301 is written as minimum offerings for an accredited school and 10.65.301's own cross-references, to ARM 10.55.402 and 10.55.403, are to rule numbers that no longer return a current rule; we have shown the whole chain so you can judge it. Sixth, we have declined to conclude that no Montana official may ever ask a homeschooling family for immunization records, and have instead printed the repealed clause, the surviving statutes, and the party each one commands. Seventh, we have not named the 2021 acts that created MCA 20-5-112 and the extracurricular ANB provision, because the Legislature's archive service would not return a complete chapter index for that session to us; the statutes' own source notes give the chapter numbers and we have cited those. Statutes, administrative rules, county forms, athletic regulations, Board of Regents policy, scholarship terms and appropriations all change, and they do not change together. Confirm anything you are relying on with the office that administers it, and consult an attorney about your own circumstances.

Curious how this works day to day when there is no state curriculum to follow? Here's the honest guide to teaching your own curriculum with us, written for every out-of-state family, Montana included. Since almost everything on this page eventually asks you for a record Montana never required, homeschool record keeping is the natural next read. And if the reason you are here is a child who was struggling in a classroom, start with homeschooling with an IEP or a learning difference. Or see the requirements for every other state.

See where your child stands first, free

Montana will never test your child, never ask for a portfolio and never tell you how they are actually doing. That is freedom, and it is also a blank page. The free placement assessment fills in the first line of it: it feels like a friendly chat, never a test, it takes about fifteen minutes, and it works the same in Montana as anywhere else. No card.

Start with the free assessment
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