State Budget Office Presents 2025-2026 Budget to Legislature

On Feb. 11, 2026, State Budget Office Director Jen Flood and Deputy Director Kyle Guerrant presented Gov. Whitmer’s 2026-2027 budget to the Legislature. This officially starts the budget season in Michigan.

In her budget, she increased the per-pupil foundation to $10,300, a 2.5% increase. The budget includes a 6% increase to weighted foundation allowance items: preschool, CTE, rural and isolated districts and Early On. It increases the Great Start Readiness Program’s target full-day allowance by 6% to $11,290 per slot. In the biggest change for this year, it codifies a weighted per-pupil amount for at-risk students and English Language Learners. The funding for these line items was rolled into the foundation allowance and then set with an average weight of 1.1967% additional funding for each at-risk student and an average of 1.0620% for each ELL student, with the weight varying by WIDA level.   

The school safety and mental health grants in Sec 31aa are funded at $300 million; however, her proposal once again includes language requiring districts to allow a comprehensive state investigation of any mass casualty event in order to qualify for funding. 

Unfortunately, the budget also increases the amount of School Aid dollars that are flowing to universities by more than $500 million. The SAF would then fund almost half of the universities’ budgets and all of the community colleges’ budgets for a total $18 billion flowing away from our K-12 classrooms.

Appropriations subcommittees will now begin their work on the budget. We urge you to continue to talk to your legislators about how this proposal will affect your district, other items that would be useful, and the timeliness of final budget decisions.

We break down the budget by certain sections on our advocacy site and will continually update it as the budget moves through the process.