Florida Bright Futures Scholarship

Updated: Aug 23

The state of Florida offers a generous merit-based scholarship, Bright Futures. The scholarship is designed to keep talented Florida high school students in the state when they go to college.

What is the Bright Futures Scholarship?

The Bright Futures Scholarship is a merit-based scholarship for students who are Florida residents. There are two levels for the scholarship:

Florida Academic Scholars and
Florida Medallion Scholars.

Florida Bright Futures offers generous scholarships for Florida residents to attend either public or private colleges and universities located in Florida. While the levels of funding that students receive are supposed to be similar between Florida public and private universities, the funds pay out in a different manner. Students at Florida private colleges and universities receive their payments on a per-credit basis. Here is a chart that shows how the money is paid: https://www.floridastudentfinancialaidsg.org/PDF/BFPrivateAwards.pdf.

Who Should Apply for a Bright Futures Scholarship?

Anyone who thinks they qualify for a Bright Futures scholarship should apply. Students can only use the scholarship in Florida, but they should still apply for it if they plan to attend college out-of-State. That way if the student later decides to transfer to a college in Florida, the student will likely be able to still use it.

How Do I Qualify for a Florida Bright Futures Scholarship?

Here are the basic requirements for Florida Academic Scholars:

A Grade Point Average (GPA) of at least 3.5;
Meeting a testing threshold of at least 29 on the ACT, 1340 (1330 for 2026 graduates) on the SAT, or 96 (95 for 2026 graduates) on the Classical Learning Test (CLT); and
100 hours of community service, 100 hours of work experience, or a combination of volunteer and work hours to reach the 100-hour minimum.

The 3.5 GPA is a weighted GPA. However, the classes that count in that GPA and the added weights are both unusual compared to how high schools and colleges calculate GPAs.

In lieu of a test score, students may qualify by earning an International Baccalaureate (IB) or Cambridge AICE diploma. This is an important exemption from the test score requirement. Staff with Cambridge AICE indicate that most students who qualify for Bright Futures using the AICE diploma do not have a test score high enough to qualify for Bright Futures. Florida offered work experience hours as an alternative to community service beginning in June 2022.

For details on the eligibility requirements, please see: https://www.floridastudentfinancialaidsg.org/PDF/BFHandbookChapter1.pdf. Students complete the Florida Financial Aid Application (FFAA) by August 31 (some years August 1) to receive this scholarship. The FFAA can be found at: https://www.floridastudentfinancialaidsg.org/SAPPRFILE/SAPPRFILE.

Florida Academic Scholars receive 100 percent of the tuition cost of a Florida public university.

Florida Medallion Scholars

Florida Medallion Scholars also earn merit scholarships to attend private colleges and universities in Florida. The eligibility thresholds are lower, but so is the size of the scholarship.

Fickle Florida Legislature

The website for these merit scholarships includes an important note: “These eligibility requirements are subject to change with each legislative session.” Florida’s legislators have a lot of “self-confidence” in making dramatic changes to laws very quickly without obtaining much input from others. In the past, the legislature came close to restricting use of Bright Futures scholarships to students who had vocational-related majors (this would have excluded students majoring in subjects such as English) in college. The legislature was only stopped because of an onslaught of resistance from families.