Georgia opts into the federal scholarship tax credit: Kemp signs the IRS election, GOAL to run the §25F program through a new arm

Georgia has opted into the federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC / ECCA / §25F). On January 20, 2026, Governor Brian Kemp (R) signed the IRS advance-election form committing the state to participate in the program, which lets individual taxpayers claim a one-for-one federal credit of up to $1,700 per taxpayer per year for donations to qualified Scholarship Granting Organizations. Days later, at the state Capitol on Tuesday, January 24, Kemp announced the move publicly with an unusually cheerful line for a tax filing. “That’s probably the happiest I’ve ever been signing an IRS document,” he said. The federal credit becomes available January 1, 2027, and in Georgia it is expected to reach families earning less than 300% of area median income, which works out to roughly $246,000 a year in metro Atlanta.

The mechanism here matters, and it is worth being precise about. Georgia did not pass a new statute or issue an executive order to join the program. Kemp executed an advance election using IRS Form 15714, the Advance Election to Participate Under Section 25F for 2027, the same administrative path the Treasury and IRS opened for states under the One Big Beautiful Bill. Georgia was not acting alone or first: it opted in alongside Virginia and Mississippi in the same January cohort, and Ballotpedia counted eleven states moving on §25F during the month. The federal credit is capped at $1,700 per taxpayer per year. Some promoters have floated a doubled $3,400 figure for married couples filing jointly, but Treasury has not settled that question, so the durable number families and donors should plan around is $1,700 per taxpayer. We walk through why in our breakdown of what the statute already settles.

Georgia is one of the few states entering §25F with an established scholarship infrastructure already in place, and the operational plan reflects that. Georgia GOAL Scholarship Program, the state’s largest Student Scholarship Organization, says it will keep running the existing state Qualified Education Expense (QEE) credit under the Georgia GOAL name. A new arm, American GOAL Scholarship Program, will administer the federal §25F credit when it launches in 2027. That two-track structure, one organization running the state program and a separate affiliate running the federal one, is a model other SSOs and SGOs are likely to study as they decide how to handle parallel state and federal credits without commingling the two pools of funds.

For donors, the near-term takeaway is that the credit does not exist yet: contributions cannot be made and credits cannot be claimed until the program goes live on January 1, 2027. Between now and then, the state and its scholarship organizations have to stand up the application and certification process, and prospective donors should track which organizations register to receive §25F gifts. For SGO and SSO operators watching Georgia, the GOAL/American GOAL split is a reminder that running a §25F program is its own administrative lift: separate eligibility checks, separate donation routing, separate compliance. Operators building that capacity from scratch can run their program on software purpose-built for §25F, and our SGO directory and explainers lay out how the organizations work.

Kemp’s election fits a broader pattern we have been tracking state by state. Virginia opted in early under Glenn Youngkin, Florida followed when Ron DeSantis signed on, and the broader picture, including states that reached §25F only by overriding their governors’ vetoes, keeps shifting. Georgia’s status, alongside every other state’s, is detailed on our Georgia state page and the national participation map. The question now is execution: whether Georgia’s mature scholarship network can convert an easy advance election into a working federal credit by the 2027 launch.