While Gov. Mikie Sherrill weighs whether to opt New Jersey into the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, a bill introduced March 19, 2026 would take the choice out of her hands: A4777 states that New Jersey “shall participate” and directs the Commissioner of Education to send an SGO roster to the U.S. Treasury. It faces long odds in a Democratic legislature, but it is the first bill to put the opt-in on New Jersey's legislative record.
New Jersey has not joined the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit (FSTC / ECCA / §25F), and its governor has not said whether it will. A bill introduced in the Assembly on March 19, 2026 would settle the question by statute rather than wait for the governor to decide. A4777, sponsored by Assemblymen Michael Inganamort and Gerry Scharfenberger and Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia, is titled “An Act requiring the State to participate in the federal tax credit program for individual contributions to scholarship granting organizations.” Its operative language is blunt: “The State of New Jersey shall participate” in the §25F program for all taxable years beginning after December 31, 2026, and the Commissioner of Education “shall annually provide” the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury the information federal law requires, including a roster of eligible Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) operating in the state.
That is a stronger instrument than the pressure measures other states have used. Where California's ACR-229 and Washington's HJM 4013 are non-binding resolutions that merely urge a governor to act, A4777 is a substantive bill that would place an affirmative duty to participate directly into New Jersey statute and assign the administrative job to the Department of Education. The catch is arithmetic: its three sponsors are Republicans in a Legislature that Democrats control, and the bill was referred to committee, where measures without majority support routinely sit without a hearing. As a practical matter it is unlikely to reach the floor this session. What it does accomplish is to convert New Jersey's opt-in question from an abstraction into concrete statutory text, on the record, with a specific mechanism attached.
New Jersey's actual status is unchanged. Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who took office in January 2026, has been noncommittal, saying the state will evaluate the program, and New Jersey has neither filed the IRS advance election (Form 15714) nor submitted a list of Scholarship Granting Organizations. The opt-in decision is annual, so nothing about this bill's likely stall forecloses a later yes: a governor who does not act for 2027 can still elect in for 2028 or any subsequent year. But for now New Jersey sits among the pending states, and every year it stays out, its residents' credit-eligible dollars flow to SGOs in states that have opted in rather than to children at home.
The stakes in New Jersey are unusually large because of who the credit would reach. The state has one of the country's biggest nonpublic-school enrollments, heavily Catholic and independent, precisely the low- and middle-income families §25F is built around (eligibility runs to households at or below 300% of area median income). That is the same argument that has moved governors of both parties elsewhere: §25F does not spend New Jersey's own money. It lets New Jersey taxpayers redirect federal tax they would otherwise owe into scholarships for local students, which reframes the decision as less an ideological stance than a choice about whether to leave a large sum unclaimed. Where the broader field of Democratic governors has landed is tracked in our coverage of how Democratic governors have split on §25F.
For anyone weighing whether to build a New Jersey SGO, A4777 is a signal rather than a green light: it shows the opt-in has legislative backers even if the votes are not there yet, while the actual decision still rests with a governor who has not tipped her hand. New Jersey's scale is the reason to be ready rather than to wait, because if the state ever files its election the demand for scholarship capacity would be substantial from day one. Founders can track New Jersey's status and every other state's on our New Jersey state page and the national participation map, see the field already forming in the SGO directory, and use our guide to starting an SGO to build the pieces that do not depend on any one governor's decision.
