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Pell Grant Amounts...Same -
Eligibility Qualifications Tighten

Pell grant amounts for 2012-2013 will stay the same (for the third straight year) for the maximum award. Students who attend full-time, have an EFC of "0", and a cost of attendance of at least $5,550 will receive $5,550.

The only problem is that for 2012-2013, in order to get the maximum award, your income must be below $23,000. For 2011-2012, your income had to be below $32,000 for the maximum award.

The smallest award given to a full-time student is $555.

The highest EFC a student can now have for an award is 4995. Last year it was 5273. The qualifications have been tightened due to changes made in the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in Dec. 2011.

Thousands of students will miss the income cutoff again, as they did in 2009-2010. Payment schedules were revised to reflect the new Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. More students were able to qualify for some kind of Pell award. But now, these students on the bubble will have to scramble to find money to replace that award. Find out how these federal Pell grant changes may affect you.

Maximum Pell Grant Amounts
Full time	$5,550
Three-Quarter time	$4,163
Half time	$2,775
Less than half time	$1,388

If you know what your EFC number is, you can compare award amounts at different schools (with different CoA's) using the Pell grant calculator. Or you can see how your award changes depending on the number of credit hours you take.

The good news is that the amount of the award should continue to go up. The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (HCERA) (signed into law on March 30,2010) freezes the current Pell grant amounts through 2012-2013. After that, increases will be linked to the Consumer Price Index. As the cost of living rises, so will these grants.

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that mandatory spending increases on Pell grants will amount to $374 billion over the next ten years.

(As a frame of reference, the new reforms in the Dec. 2011 spending bill, are estimated to save more than $11 billion over the next 10 years by the Congressional Budget Office.)

By 2019, the maximum award is projected to be $5,975.

Students who apply for Pell grant awards (over the last few years) saw these awards increase at a faster rate than their cost of attendance. (The current freeze on award amounts will affect this trend.)

pell grant amounts and cost of attendance

What a Pell grant is supposed to do is provide lower income students with a base of financial aid that can be added to other grants, scholarships for college, work-aid and low-cost loans.

The 2012-2013 Pell grant application also allows students (or parents) who have recently lost their jobs, to indicate this on the form. An award can then be given to them, even if their financial information for 2011 would not qualify them for one.

After you fill out the Pell grant form you will get an estimate of your award amount based on your financial information and the schools you have listed. It will say "an award up to..." If (later on) you choose a school with a lower cost of attendance or if you decide to go less than full-time, this amount will be scaled back.

Unfortunately, it is no longer possible that your federal Pell grant eligibility will qualify you to double your yearly award amount, if you are enrolled in a summer session. This was offered to students that wanted to graduate more quickly than the one award in a year would allow. This program was only available for a couple of years, and is now permanently canceled. The problem was that it was much more popular than anyone in the Department of Education expected, and therefore it was too expensive.

(Which, if you think about it, tells you that the stereotypical idea of the perpetual Pell student who doesn't want to graduate, is not just confined to right-wing nuts.)

Check out these important financial aid topics, too:

Federal college loans

Instant bad credit loans?

Private school loans

Pell grant amounts are going up even though the requirements for renewal of these awards has tightened. Students will still be able to use these grants instead of or in addition to college loans.