There may be no comment period on the §25F rules. Treasury's own paperwork says they take effect the day they publish.

On July 3, the federal government published its 2026 Unified Agenda, the semiannual inventory in which every agency tells the Office of Management and Budget, and the public, which regulations it plans to issue and what form they will take. Treasury’s section contains the two entries that will govern the Education Freedom Tax Credit: RIN 1545-BR97, the proposed regulations, and RIN 1545-BS17, the temporary regulations, both filed under docket number REG-117199-25, both appearing in the agenda for the first time. Each carries a one-line timetable, and it is not the one anyone has been planning around. It reads Interim Final Rule. No education or tax outlet has reported this as of publication. We have archived both entries verbatim so you can read exactly what Treasury filed.

The label matters because federal rulemaking runs on two very different tracks. The normal track is a proposed rule: the agency publishes a draft, the public gets a comment window, typically 30 to 60 days, the agency is required to respond to what it hears, and only then does a final rule bind anyone. That is the track everyone expects here, because Treasury’s own June guidance preview promised proposed regulations by the end of September 2026, and state agencies, scholarship organizations, and advisors have built their fall around commenting on that draft. An interim final rule is the other track: it takes legal effect the day it appears in the Federal Register, and comments are collected afterward, when everyone is already living under it. These are the rules that will decide which organizations qualify as Scholarship Granting Organizations, how states certify them, and what donors must document to claim the credit. If the agenda entries hold, the assumed gap between seeing those rules and being bound by them does not exist.

Treasury’s paperwork is candid about why it wants the faster instrument. The abstract for the temporary regulations calls them “necessary to provide the procedure for States to make an Election, and to submit the State’s SGO List in the Fall of 2026 to complete an Election or perfect an Advance Election, before Final regulations will be published.” Read that against the calendar and the logic is plain: §25F wants each participating state’s list of qualifying SGOs in Treasury’s hands around January 1, 2027, and a September proposal followed by a comment cycle cannot produce binding certification rules in time. One thing this does not mean: the credit itself still begins with contributions made on or after January 1, 2027, not a day earlier. What moves up is the machinery that decides which organizations are on a state’s list when it does.

Now the honest caveats. A Unified Agenda entry states intent, not commitment. Both entries carry “Legal Deadline: None,” the 07/2026 date on their timetables has already passed with nothing published, and agenda text is often drafted weeks before OMB posts it, so these entries may even predate the June preview. Treasury could still publish a conventional proposed rule. But the agenda is not a stray document either: it is the formal channel through which an agency declares its regulatory plans, and both §25F entries say the same thing. The question resolves at the last checkpoint before publication. Every significant rule must stop for review at OIRA, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House office that clears regulations before they publish, and the stage label the rule carries when it arrives there settles which instrument this is. As of July 29 neither RIN had arrived. We re-verified every field in this story against reginfo.gov before publishing.

That checkpoint is also the one lever the public holds before the rule binds, and it is worth explaining concretely because almost nobody outside Washington knows it exists. While a rule sits at OIRA, Executive Order 12866 obligates the office to keep its door open: any affected member of the public, an SGO operator, a school association, a state agency, a tax advisor, can request a meeting with OIRA’s reviewers, and the Treasury attorneys drafting the rule typically join the call. You do not get to see the draft text. You get roughly half an hour to say what will break if the rule is written a certain way, and to hand over a short memo that goes in front of the people writing it. A new scholarship organization, for example, could argue that certification criteria must not shut out organizations formed in 2026, before that choice is final. Requesting one is a form on reginfo.gov: find the RIN in the EO 12866 meeting search, submit your name and topic, and OIRA schedules the meeting, publishing your attendees and materials afterward for transparency. As of this writing, not one such meeting has been requested on either §25F RIN. Comment still counts after publication too: an interim final rule opens its own docket on regulations.gov under REG-117199-25, and Treasury must address those comments in the final version. What an interim final rule removes is only the chance to change the text before it takes effect, which is exactly what an OIRA meeting is for.

We check the OIRA review list every day and will report the moment either RIN appears, including the label it carries, because that is what proves or breaks this reading. If you are building an SGO, plan for certification opening on shorter notice than a September proposal implies: start with our guide to starting an SGO, check your state on the participation map, and see who is already organizing in the SGO directory.