Mississippi Opts Into §25F: Reeves Makes the Election, but the SGO List Is Still Coming

On January 19, 2026, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves (R) announced that the state will participate in the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit (§25F), the program created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed July 4, 2025. The credit is worth up to $1,700 per taxpayer, claimed dollar-for-dollar (and nonrefundable) against federal tax for cash donations to qualifying Scholarship Granting Organizations, with scholarships reserved for households at or below 300% of area median income. The program begins in federal tax year 2027, effective January 1, 2027, so Reeves's move is an advance commitment well ahead of the first dollar moving. The Office of the Governor framed the decision as a way to promote school choice for Mississippi families.

The mechanism here is an advance election rather than legislation. On December 12, 2025, the IRS issued a notice allowing states to opt in early by submitting IRS Form 15714, and Ballotpedia reports that Mississippi formally elected to participate through that form. The governor's own press release describes the opt-in in plainer terms, as an administrative decision to join the program, while the “Form 15714” framing comes from Ballotpedia and the underlying IRS notice. Either way, it is the same act at different levels of detail: an executive opt-in that puts Mississippi on the participating list without a floor vote or a veto fight. We explain how the advance election works in our coverage of the IRS Form 15714 advance election, and we track which states have made the call on the national participation map.

The catch, and the part worth tracking, is that opting in is only the first step. Reeves said the Office of the Governor will designate the state's eligible Scholarship Granting Organizations “in the coming months,” meaning SGO certification is still pending and Mississippi has not yet published a list of organizations that can actually receive donations. The credit cannot function on the ground until those SGOs exist and are approved, so there is a real gap between the election and a working program. That gap echoes Alaska, where Governor Dunleavy opted in administratively before any SGOs were stood up, and it stands in contrast to mature school-choice states that already had scholarship infrastructure to layer the federal credit onto. For now, Mississippi donors know the credit is coming but cannot yet point to a certified recipient.

For prospective SGO founders, that pending designation window is the opportunity. Whoever gets certified first will be positioned to receive Mississippi's federal donations when the program goes live in 2027, and the state has signaled the door is open in the coming months rather than years. Founders weighing whether to establish one of Mississippi's first §25F organizations can review how the credit and the SGO role work in our explainers, see the current national landscape in the SGO directory, and watch the state's certification status on our Mississippi state page. Standing up a compliant federal SGO, one that meets the 90% scholarship floor and the 300% area-median-income means test, is largely an operations problem, which is why a growing number of operators run their programs on software written for §25F from the start.

Mississippi joins a wave of states that made the election in January 2026, from Virginia's first-in-the-nation opt-in to Florida under Governor DeSantis. The shared lesson is that the headline opt-in is the easy part, and the substance follows in the certification and build-out that comes next. As Mississippi moves from election to a published SGO list, the question shifts from whether the credit exists to which organizations will administer it cleanly. We will follow the rollout as the state names its first eligible SGOs and the program comes online.