Did you know last December’s Wide World of Advocacy (the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat…) was our most read blog post of the holiday season? Yes, even more than the Holiday Finance Posters! This year we’re back with a gridiron football theme. Gear up for NGPF's 2025 advocacy year in review: gratitude for a whole team effort, chunk plays down the field, fumbles, wins after losses, and our 2026 season preview. Set...Hike!

Gratitude for a whole team effort

NGPF’s Super Bowl (we call it Mission 2030) is that all U.S. high schoolers should be guaranteed to take a standalone personal finance course before they graduate.

Students, parents, teachers, education leaders, government affairs professionals, business leaders, financial experts, researchers, think tanks, lawmakers, and community leaders all joined NGPF to champion this simple, nonpartisan policy in 2025.

This year we reached a milestone that was unfathomable just a few years ago: THIRTY STATES NOW REQUIRE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS TO TAKE A PERSONAL FINANCE COURSE (my best John Madden voice, Rest in Peace)!

We’re so grateful you’re on our team. Thank you for advocating for smart policy for students this year, and always!

Chunk plays: which states adopted personal finance graduation requirements in 2025?

Forgive me, football heads who already know this: with a “chunk play,” a team makes a big gain down the field in one play.

2025 was a year of chunk plays, with lots of new states making big moves to support their students with life-changing financial education.

Four new states adopted standalone personal finance graduation requirements of at least one semester in 2025, all of which start with the graduating high school class of 2030:

1. When HB342 was signed into law in March 2025, Kentucky adopted a one-credit (full year!) personal finance course as a graduation requirement for all public high school students.
2. When HB25-1192 was signed into law in May 2025, Colorado adopted a requirement that all public high school students take a required course that covers ALL of the state’s high school financial literacy standards.
3. When HB27 was signed into law in June 2025, Texas adopted a one-half credit personal finance course as a high school graduation requirement.
4. When HB203 was signed into law in October 2025, Delaware adopted a one-half credit financial literacy course as a high school graduation requirement.

As of writing in December 2025, thirty states will now require a standalone personal finance course of at least one semester that all high schoolers take to graduate. As a result, 76% of all U.S. high schoolers will be required to take this life-changing course by 2031.

How were these states able to move the ball forward? Teacher-led, creative problem-solving.

Personal finance graduation requirements are unlike any other state mandate because of:

• The urgent need. Students need personal finance education right now to confront alarming threats like sports betting apps, cryptocurrency speculation, social media scams, and stock trading apps that blur the line between investing and gambling.
• The public demand. The voting public is overwhelmingly supportive of requiring students to take a standalone personal finance course. This policy consistently polls between 80% and 90% in favor. It's near-impossible to find a policy that so many Americans agree on.
• The locally tailored solution. In football, there's a concept called "bend, don't break" whereby defenders "bend" to absorb moderate offensive gains, but never break coverage or miss tackles to allow those devastating big plays down the field.
  • Personal finance graduation requirements also bend, but don't break. They are flexible in the curriculum schools use, the certifications to teach the course, the departments in which the course is housed in local districts, and the existing requirements the course can replace. But they don't break to allow anything less than what works for students: the standalone course.

Fumbles - which states dropped the ball with personal finance education in 2025?

It’s 4th and Goal, the game is on the line, and only one team gets to win. Hopefully it's the team that's advocating for students? Not always.

In the last week of North Dakota’s legislative session this winter, lobbyists for an influential group of Superintendents convinced Bismarck lawmakers to water down a bill from a standalone personal finance course requirement to an embedded requirement where financial literacy standards could be incorporated into other courses. This is an approach that is proven not to work, like running a QB Draw from your own end zone.

The weakened bill was signed into law and celebrated as an easy win (look, it was supported by the State Superintendents!) by lawmakers and the Governor.

Sadly, it will do little to help North Dakota’s students build durable financial skills.

This was a tough fumble for our mission, but we pulled off our helmets and slumped to the sideline to debrief.

Here’s what we learned:

1. This isn't the movies. Underdog outsiders like NGPF (understandably) have much less influence over legislative priorities than, say, a state’s powerful School Superintendents Association.
   • In this case, our underdog mentality should have made us dig deeper to show more compelling stories, data, and blueprints for success. We fell flat on that, and we're sorry to the students of North Dakota that we couldn't get this done for you.
   • Another interpretation is that NGPF was just the wrong quarterback for this particular game. An inside game needs inside players.
2. Headlines win. This won't be news to you, but in the press, the headline trumps the article.
   • On our issue, embedded financial education requirements like North Dakota’s are proven not to help students, but they get more positive media headlines for Governors, lawmakers, and State Treasurers than standalone personal finance requirements do.
   • There is less incentive for policymakers to get the details right when the headline will be the same regardless. Again, this is an understandable (if a little frustrating) dynamic. As you may recall from a certain Al Pacino classic, football is a "game of inches." So is education policy.
     • Consider this misleading headline, North Dakota makes personal finance a graduation requirement.
     • Readers' first reaction is likely to be, "NICE!" and then they move on to the next thing in their busy lives.
     • Only by reading the article (or better yet, the butchered bill, HB1533) can you decipher just how weak and ineffective this policy is. Details matter.
3. PR beats Principles. At the time (April's Financial Literacy Month), Governor Doug Burgum was on a PR tour claiming he wanted to make North Dakota the “most financially literate state,” competing with Utah. It was more efficient for the Governor’s office to notch an easy PR win than to champion a policy that actually worked for students.
   • Side Note: Utah has had a very successful standalone personal finance graduation requirement since 2008.

Onward!

Wins after losses - what states overcame bad policy?

Sometimes your team just needs to get knocked down to reach its potential the next game.

Back in 2024, the New Mexico State Senate rejected an amendment to NM House Bill 171 that would have made personal finance a graduation requirement for all NM high schoolers.

The Senate floor session when this all went down was a truly bizarre experience.

One Senator claimed that personal finance was already being taught in ALL of New Mexico’s high schools. To back up her claim, she put a group of high school students in attendance on the spot, asking them, “Tell these people - what are some of the amazing personal finance lessons you learned in school?” The students (and mind you, these young women were voluntarily attending a legislative hearing...) couldn’t remember a single personal finance lesson from any grade.

It didn’t matter. The Senate rubber stamped the embedded requirement (just like North Dakota's above) and HB171 was signed into law shortly thereafter.

Fast forward to late 2025, and despite House Bill 171's watered down result, over 50% of all New Mexico high school students are required to take a standalone personal finance course to graduate, NGPF is running free FinCamps in the state, and teachers are buzzing!

How’d that happen? Think New Mexico, a local think tank advocating for smart policy for New Mexico’s residents, has been blocking and tackling to persuade local NM school districts to adopt personal finance as one of their local graduation requirements under HB171. Their ground game is working!

Season preview - where is the NGPF advocacy team headed in 2026?

Great football teams excel when their offense, defense, and special teams units work in harmony. We plan to do the same for financial education in 2026.

Offense - what new states are on the schedule for 2026?

There are 20 states plus DC left that do not have a personal finance graduation requirement. We’ll be playing some offense, targeting the 2 to 4 states we think are likely to be the next to adopt standalone personal finance graduation requirements.

We need to keep the list of potential states to ourselves for now. We don’t want the opponents seeing our playbook and all that.

Defense - what is threatening the movement for effective financial education?

We see 3 systemic threats to effective financial education in 2026:

1. Check-the-box. States are still proposing “embedded” financial education policies (e.g. New York’s NY Inspires Plan and Massachusetts H4670) that have been proven not to work since the early 2000s.
2. A missed AP opportunity. College Board lobbyists are storming State Boards of Education to plead that their AP Business Course should be able to fulfill a dedicated personal finance course requirement. It cannot, because it doesn’t meet state standards for personal finance. It has only 1 week of personal finance instruction before the AP Exam, and 4 weeks after, when students are checked out. If state officials take the College Board’s friendly lobbyists at their word instead of actually looking at the AP course, yikes!
3. Backsliding. The bad news is that the list of states whose education agencies have ignored state laws and simply encouraged school districts to keep doing the status quo is growing. The good news is we believe they won’t get away with it. Between legal challenges, coalition campaigns, bill sponsor activism, and Governor pressure, we’re confident we can help state departments uphold what their states signed into law: the standalone personal finance course.

Special teams - what opportunities are coming NGPF's way?

Sometimes we don’t play offense or defense, we just line up for the ball to be kicked to us, then see what we can do with our jukes and backwards hurdles. If you've read this far and you're a Philadelphia Eagles fan, there's a well-deserved easter egg for you.

State Boards of Education are beginning to reach out to consult with NGPF on crafting their future personal finance policies - or overhauling their existing policies. Nothing is set in stone yet, so we'll will keep these states private for now, too. Sorry to tease!

Who's joining us for the Super Bowl - ahem, Mission 2030 - in 2026?

Our nation's students are depending on us to get this right! Happy Holidays, and see you out there on the advocacy trail in 2026!

About the Author

Christian Sherrill

Former teacher, forever financial education nerd. As NGPF's Director of Teacher Success, Christian is laser-focused on helping the heroic teachers who fuel NGPF's mission to guarantee all students a life-changing personal finance course. Having paid down over $40k in student loans in the span of 3 years - while living in the Bay Area on an entry level teacher's salary - he's eager to help the next generation avoid financial pitfalls one semester at a time.