The FCC has opened the most sweeping review of the E-Rate program since it began in 1998. The NPRM (WC Docket No. 26-133) asks whether the roughly $2.4 billion program should be restructured, refocused on rural areas, or sunset entirely. Answering those questions well requires knowing where the money goes. Until now, that was hard.
TPI’s new E-Rate Explorer makes it easy. The site provides a free downloadable funding report for every one of the 24,660 school districts, library systems, and consortia that have received E-Rate support, plus reports for every state and all 440 congressional districts, covering 1998 through 2025. Each report shows total subsidies, discount rates, top recipients, and service providers, built entirely from USAC’s public data.
If you run a school district or library, you can pull your own funding history in seconds and use it in your comments. If you represent an association or a state, you can see how funds flow to your members. If you work in Congress, there is a report for your district. No other resource we know of presents E-Rate funding by congressional district.
USAC publishes all of the underlying data through its E-Rate datasets and data tools, but turning it into usable analysis has meant downloading more than 20 million rows and spending months cleaning them. We know because we did it that way five years ago. Detailed E-Rate analytics have mostly been sold as subscription products aimed at applicants and vendors, or offered piecemeal as consultant marketing. New AI tools have cut the cost of this work dramatically, so we are providing ready-made reports for every recipient, state, and congressional district, free, and organized for people who want to evaluate the program rather than apply to it.
Start with the summary report, E-Rate Spending Statistics 2020-2025, or browse the full index of every report.
Full data notes and sources are on the site. Errors are our own. Contact Sarah Oh Lam ([email protected]) with corrections.
Sarah Oh Lam is a Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute. Oh completed her PhD in Economics from George Mason University, and holds a JD from GMU and a BS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. She was previously the Operations and Research Director for the Information Economy Project at George Mason School of Law. She has also presented research at the 39th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference and has co-authored work published in the Northwestern Journal of Technology & Intellectual Property among other research projects. Her research interests include law and economics, regulatory analysis, and technology policy.
