The acceptance email from the microschool came with a supply list, and near the bottom, in the same font as the glue sticks: student must bring a laptop. You have an education account with $10,474 in it. This should be a solved problem.
It is solvable. It is also the single most misunderstood line in the Texas Education Freedom Accounts expense rules, and in Austin specifically there is a practical obstacle that has nothing to do with the rules at all.
The cap, to the dollar
Computer hardware, software and technology are eligible, but not to exceed 10 percent of the annual amount credited to a student's account. The state's family guidance phrases it the same way: capped at 10 percent of the year's transfer.
For a private school student on the standard award, 10 percent of $10,474 is $1,047.40. For a family on the homeschool tier, 10 percent of $2,000 is $200. That second figure is the one that surprises people. A $200 technology allowance does not buy a laptop; it buys a keyboard, a year of a reading app and most of a tablet case.
The cap is also a single pool. Hardware, software and technology sit in one category, so a $700 Chromebook and $350 in annual software subscriptions together put a private school family at the ceiling with forty cents to spare.
Two conditions people skip past
Eligibility is not automatic just because the thing has a screen. The expense guidance sets two tests: the technology has to be required by the private school or prescribed by a physician to facilitate the child's education, and it has to be used primarily for educational purposes.
"Required by the private school" is doing real work in that sentence. A supply list that says "must bring a laptop" is closer to the requirement than a parent's reasonable conclusion that a laptop would help. If the school's own documentation states the device requirement, keep that document. If it doesn't, ask the office to put it in the enrollment packet. It costs them a sentence and it is the difference between a clean expense and an argument.
The physician route exists for families whose child needs a specific device or assistive software for a diagnosed reason. It is a real pathway, not a loophole, and it is narrower than it sounds: the prescription has to tie the technology to the child's education, not to general wellbeing.
Austin's approved list sells software, not hardware
Here is the local problem. Every payment has to clear the program's online platform, and the platform can only pay providers who have registered. Our directory of approved providers across Travis, Williamson, Hays and Bastrop counties holds 185 registered tutors, therapists and vendors as the state finder showed them in mid-October 2026.
Fifteen of those 185 list supplies. Eight carry a technology-flavored specialty. Read the eight and the pattern is unmistakable: a language-learning app out of Austin, an online learning platform, an educational software provider, a Cedar Park book and media supplier with a computer science line, a coding program at a wilderness school in Bastrop, a theater center teaching technology alongside dance. These are course providers and content sellers. Not one of them is a computer retailer.
So the thing the cap is nominally for — a physical device — has no obvious seller in the Austin marketplace. That is not a rule problem. It is a registration problem, and it is the same shortage that has hit transportation and assessments in metros across the state.
What families here are actually doing
Three workarounds, in descending order of how well they hold up.
The cleanest is to buy through the school. If your private school or microschool is itself a registered provider — and most enrolled families' schools are, because that is how tuition gets paid — ask whether the school will source the required device and bill it to the account alongside tuition. The school already has the portal relationship, the requirement is documented on its own supply list, and the expense lands in the right category.
The second is to ask a registered supplies vendor whether it can order hardware. Several of the Austin-area supplies providers already handle kits, manipulatives and subscriptions; adding a device to an order is a business decision, not a regulatory one.
The third, and the one worth being honest about, is to buy the laptop with your own money and spend the account on things the Austin marketplace does sell well. That is not a defeat. With 70 tutoring providers and 68 therapy providers registered locally, the account's purchasing power here is in instruction, not equipment.
What the cap does not touch
This is the part that saves families money, so it is worth being precise. The 10 percent ceiling applies to computer hardware, software and technology. It does not apply to everything delivered on a computer.
Online educational courses and programs are course and program fees — the same category as private school tuition and dual-credit coursework — not technology. Textbooks and instructional materials required by the school, provider or course are their own category. An online course that happens to cost $1,500 is not blocked by a $1,047 technology cap, because it is not technology; it is a course.
The distinction turns on what you are buying, not how it reaches your child. A subscription to a learning app is a technology purchase. Enrollment in a semester-long online class taught by a provider is a course fee. Sorting your spring purchases into those two buckets before you start is the whole trick.
Before you spend
Get the device requirement in writing from the school. Add up every subscription you expect for the year before you buy hardware, because they share the ceiling. Ask your school first and a supplies vendor second. And keep every purchase inside the portal — nothing bought outside it comes back to you.
Our overview of how the accounts work in the Austin area covers the award tiers and the portal rules, and our page on funding an Austin microschool is the right next read if the supply list that started all this came from one.
Sources
- Texas Education Freedom Accounts — Eligible educational expenses (10% technology cap, school-required or physician-prescribed test, course fees, textbooks, portal rule)
- Texas Education Freedom Accounts — Families (award amounts, approved expense list, technology cap)
- Texas Education Freedom Accounts (program home: installment dates and program totals)