Maryland Scholarships & Grants (2027-2028): Guaranteed Access Grant, Senatorial & Delegate Scholarships and Deadlines

Last updated: August 27, 2026 · Facts verified against the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) Office of Student Financial Assistance (mhec.maryland.gov)

Maryland has real money on the table. It is also one of the few states where the biggest state awards are need-based, the merit money comes from colleges rather than the state, and four of your elected officials each control a separate scholarship pot that almost nobody applies for. This page explains how Maryland state aid actually works in plain English, what the Class of 2027 needs to file and when, and which deadline actually decides how much your family pays.

Want to explore scholarships beyond state aid? You can browse all colleges on our College Scholarships hub, compare options using our CRP Scholarship Search Tool, or see how aid works elsewhere on the State Scholarships & Grants hub.

Senior in the 2026-2027 School Year? The Aid Year You Need Is 2027-2028

Maryland, and the FAFSA, name an aid year for the year the money gets spent, not the year you fill out the forms. If your student is a senior right now, you are working through the 2026-2027 school year on aid labeled 2027-2028. That is not a typo and you are not early. This page is the one you want.

The shortcut: take your student’s high school year and add one. Senior in 2026-2027 means every form, deadline, and award you are chasing says 2027-2028 on it.

Your move: open the FAFSA and look at the year printed at the top. If it says 2027-2028 and your student is a senior, you are in the right place.

How Maryland State Aid Actually Works

Maryland runs its state aid through two doors, and most families only know about the first one.

Door one is the application. Either the FAFSA, or, for Maryland residents who are eligible for in-state tuition but not eligible to file the FAFSA, the MHEC One-App. The One-App replaced the old Maryland State Financial Aid Application (MSFAA), and you will still see the old name on school handouts and on some MHEC pages. It is the same purpose under a new name. You file one or the other, not both, and it must be in by March 1.

Door two is MDCAPS, the Maryland College Aid Processing System. This is where awards appear, where you accept them, where you report housing status, and where MHEC asks for documents. Filing the FAFSA does not create the MDCAPS account. A family that files by March 1 and never opens MDCAPS can lose an award they had already earned, because the document request went to a portal nobody logged into.

Two terms you will hit repeatedly. Cost of attendance (COA) is the school’s full published estimate for a year: tuition, fees, housing, food, books, transportation. Student Aid Index (SAI) is the number the FAFSA produces that estimates what your family can contribute. Maryland calculates most of its need-based awards as COA, adjusted for where the student lives, minus SAI, minus Pell, minus certain state awards. That leftover is what MHEC calls adjusted financial need.

Four myths that cost Maryland families real money

Myth 1: “The Guaranteed Access Grant covers full cost of attendance.” It does not. The GA Grant pays up to 100 percent of the student’s calculated adjusted financial need for the first two years of the award, capped at a maximum MHEC sets each year. For 2026-2027 that maximum was $18,000. Need is not the same as cost, and the two numbers are usually thousands of dollars apart.

Myth 2: “Filing the FAFSA by March 1 is enough.” Not by itself. MHEC’s published requirement is that a Maryland college or university must be listed on the FAFSA or One-App by March 1. Seniors who are still waiting on decisions sometimes list only out-of-state schools, or list none at all. That family filed on time and gets nothing.

Myth 3: “If I qualify, the state will find me.” True for the Rawlings grants, which MDCAPS considers automatically. Not true for the Senatorial and Delegate Scholarships, the Conroy and Cryor Scholarships, the Community College Promise Scholarship, or the 2+2 Transfer Scholarship. Those require you to go somewhere and ask.

Myth 4: “Maryland has a merit scholarship for good grades, like HOPE or Bright Futures.” It does not. Maryland has no statewide merit award tied to a GPA or test score. The merit money in Maryland comes from the colleges, which is why the college choice moves your bill more here than the state award does. That is the whole argument for reading the college section before you read anything else.

The Rawlings Grants: Maryland’s Two Biggest Need-Based Awards

The Delegate Howard P. Rawlings Educational Excellence Awards are the state’s largest need-based program. There is no separate application. File the FAFSA or One-App by March 1 with a Maryland school listed and MDCAPS considers you automatically. Two grants sit inside it, and the gap between them is large.

The one-line rule: the GA Grant pays a share of your need, not a share of the bill. Two students with identical GA awards at two different Maryland schools will have very different amounts left to pay, because cost of attendance and housing status both feed the calculation. MHEC prorates the award for students living off campus or with a parent.

There is also a third door for families who file late. The Campus-Based Educational Assistance Grant (CBEAG) exists specifically for students who filed the FAFSA or One-App on March 2 or later. It runs $400 to $3,000 (2026-2027), calculated at 40 percent of adjusted need at four-year schools and 60 percent at community colleges, and it is awarded by your college out of an allocation MHEC sends the campus. You cannot hold it alongside the GA Grant, the EA Grant, or the Part-Time Grant. If you missed March 1, this is the call to make, and you make it to your college’s financial aid office, not to MHEC.

The 30-Credit Rule: Maryland’s Most Expensive Piece of Fine Print

Full-time keeps your student enrolled. It does not keep their grant whole.

Maryland defines full-time enrollment as 12 credits a semester. That is 24 credits across a school year, and for the first two years of a Rawlings award it is enough. Starting in the third year, MHEC applies a credit completion requirement, and the threshold is not 24. It is 30.

Read that bottom row again. It is not a suspension. A student who drops below 24 completed credits at the end of their second year on the award is out of the Rawlings program for good, even if they go on to a perfect year afterward. That is the sentence that costs Maryland students the most money, and almost nobody hears it before it happens.

A few mechanics worth knowing. “Completed” means any grade above an F, so a D counts and a withdrawal does not. A failed course that is retaken counts once. The clock counts years in which the award was received, not years enrolled. Credits earned while dually enrolled in high school do not count and do not start the clock. Summer credits count once the transcript posts, which is why a summer course is the standard repair when a spring semester goes sideways.

Your move: at the end of every fall term, add up completed credits and compare to 15. If the number is 12 or 13, register for one extra spring course or plan a summer class in advance, while it is still a scheduling decision rather than an emergency.

Major Maryland Programs, One Card Each

Every figure below carries the aid year MHEC published it for. Where a 2027-2028 amount has not been set, we say so instead of estimating.

Your Four Legislators, and How to Actually Work Them

This is the part of Maryland aid with the widest gap between what is available and how many families claim it. The Senatorial and Delegate Scholarships are open to essentially every Maryland resident pursuing a credential: high school seniors, full-time and part-time undergraduates, graduate students, private career school enrollees, students in certificate and licensure sequences, and undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition. All in-state majors qualify. There is no published income cutoff and no GPA floor in the state’s eligibility list.

What there is instead is friction. Four separate offices, four separate processes, four separate deadlines, none of which are posted in one place. That friction is why the pool of applicants stays small, and it is the entire opportunity.

Step one: find your district. Your state senator and three delegates are set by your home address. Look them up at the Maryland General Assembly district lookup. Note that these are your state legislators in Annapolis, not your members of Congress. Families confuse the two constantly and email the wrong office.

Step two: email all four the same week. One senator, three delegates, four emails. Ask two questions: what is your scholarship application process, and what is your deadline for the 2027-2028 year. Keep it to four sentences. Legislative offices answer this question routinely and a scholarship coordinator usually handles it.

Step three: file the FAFSA by March 1 regardless. Some legislators run their own selection. Others ask the MHEC Office of Student Financial Assistance to identify and award students on their behalf, and in that case OSFA awards on need as shown on the FAFSA, with a March 1 filing requirement. You will not know which model your legislator uses until you ask, so file by March 1 and keep both paths open.

Step four: send documents where the office tells you, not to MHEC. Required documentation for these two programs goes directly to the legislator’s office.

Step five: put the Delegate reapplication on the following year’s calendar. The Senatorial Scholarship can renew for up to three years, and a fifth-year request is possible under specific conditions. The Delegate Scholarship does not renew at all. Every year, four emails again.

One more thing worth knowing: both scholarships can be held alongside all other state awards, subject to the total-award ceiling. This is not an either-or against the Rawlings grants.

You are allowed to ask. These are public funds administered by elected officials who represent your household. Asking a delegate’s office how to apply for a scholarship program they run is not an imposition. It is the process working the way it was designed.

Maryland Runs on Two Calendars, and Only One Gets Publicized

The state calendar runs to March 1. The college calendar runs to November 1. The college calendar is worth more money.

Here is why the mismatch matters so much in Maryland specifically. Because the state has no merit program, the merit money in a Maryland family’s award package comes almost entirely from the college. And college merit is awarded off the admission application, on the admission timeline, which in Maryland clusters in early November.

Every Maryland college in our database gates its automatic merit on a fall date. Towson states that its November 1 Freshman Early Action deadline is required for merit consideration. UMBC uses November 1 Early Action to guarantee consideration, with rolling review continuing only while funds remain. The University of Maryland College Park uses November 1 Early Action. Coppin State and Morgan State use December 1. Mount St. Mary’s uses a December 1 priority date. Loyola Maryland has no separate scholarship deadline but positions merit off the first-year admission cycle, with Early Action strongest.

The state’s March 1 date does not move any of that. By March, at most Maryland publics, the merit decisions are made.

There is a second asymmetry to know about. Maryland’s automatic merit is generally awarded off the admission file with no essay, no interview, and no committee, which means the application your student already has to submit is the scholarship application. Submitting it eight weeks earlier costs the family nothing and is the single highest-return scheduling decision in the senior fall.

Your move: before October 1, write down the Early Action date for every school on the list, next to March 1, 2027. If any of them reads November 1, that is the deadline the family is actually working toward. Verify each one on the college’s own admission page, because published deadlines shift and some colleges list different dates for admission and for scholarship consideration. When two dates conflict at the same school, call the admission office and ask which one governs merit.

Maryland Deadlines

The dates that repeat every year

The Class of 2027 milestone chain

How Maryland Aid Stacks

Maryland writes its stacking rules into statute. Under Education Article section 18-113, a student may hold more than one state award, but the total of all student financial assistance cannot exceed the student’s total cost of education as certified by the institution. Separately, MHEC applies a fixed dollar ceiling on combined state awards, and as noted above, the published figure for that ceiling currently differs across MHEC and institutional sources.

The specific combinations that matter:

• GA Grant plus Senatorial plus Delegate: allowed. Both legislative scholarships may be held with all state awards, up to the ceiling.
• GA Grant plus EA Grant: not a stack and not a sequence. They are alternatives, and taking EA first ends GA eligibility for good.
• CBEAG plus GA, EA, or Part-Time Grant: not allowed. CBEAG is the alternative for late filers, not an add-on.
• Promise Scholarship plus federal Pell: allowed, and Pell comes first. Promise is last-dollar, meaning it covers what is left of tuition and mandatory fees after other aid is applied. A student with a large Pell award may receive a small Promise award or none, because there is nothing left for it to cover.
• State awards plus college merit: allowed, and this is where the real money is built. The cap is on state awards and on total cost, not on college scholarships specifically.

The two examples below are illustrative. The dollar figures are realistic but invented to show the mechanics. They are not quotes and no family should budget from them.

Common Ways Maryland Aid Gets Lost

None of these are academic failures. Every one is a process failure, and every one is preventable with a calendar reminder.

Who Benefits Most From Maryland State Aid

Low-income families. This is where Maryland is strongest. A household under 130 percent of federal poverty guidelines with a student who enrolls full-time at a Maryland institution and files by March 1 is looking at the GA Grant, which is one of the more generous need-based state awards in the country for the students it reaches. Add Pell, add a legislative scholarship, add college merit, and the four-year public bill can get very small.

Middle-income families. This is where families give up too early. You will likely not qualify for the GA Grant. You may still qualify for the EA Grant, you are eligible for the Senatorial and Delegate Scholarships regardless of income, and if a community college start is on the table, the Promise income lines published for 2025-2026, $100,000 and $150,000, reach well into Maryland’s middle class. Maryland has one of the highest median household incomes in the country, which means a very large number of Maryland families read the words “need-based” and stop reading. Do not stop reading.

High-achieving students. Maryland’s state programs will not reward the transcript. The colleges will. A strong student’s entire merit outcome in Maryland runs through the November and December admission deadlines, which makes senior-fall scheduling the highest-leverage thing in the process.

Students who test poorly. Better positioned in Maryland than in most states. The state’s largest awards read income and enrollment, not test scores. Several Maryland colleges run automatic merit off GPA without a test requirement. The absence of a statewide merit program cuts both ways, and for this student it cuts favorably.

Adult and returning students. Mixed. The GA Grant has a hard age ceiling of 26 and requires starting college within six years of high school, which closes it to most returning adults. But the legislative scholarships explicitly cover part-time students, graduate students, private career school enrollees, and people in certificate or licensure sequences at community colleges, including reimbursement for someone enrolled in such a program within the last two years. The Promise Scholarship exempts applicants who graduated high school five or more years ago from the transcript requirement. Maryland has more for adult learners than its marketing suggests.

First-generation families. The single highest-value thing on this page for you is the two-calendar problem. The school will publicize March 1 because that is the state’s date. Nobody will tell you that the college’s November date decided most of the money. If you do one thing after reading this page, write down every Early Action date before October 1.

Maryland Colleges and Transfer Pathways

Maryland’s state award is roughly flat across institutions. The GA Grant formula responds to cost of attendance and housing, but the state is not paying more because a student picked a more selective school. What varies enormously is what the college adds on top. That makes the college choice, not the state application, the biggest lever your family controls.

Applying by November 1

These schools require or strongly reward a November 1 Early Action application for merit consideration. Award ladders, GPA and test thresholds, and renewal requirements are on each college’s page.

• University of Maryland, College Park, the state flagship. November 1 Early Action.
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). November 1 Early Action guarantees consideration; rolling review continues only while funds remain, which is a meaningful difference from a hard cutoff.
• Towson University. November 1 Freshman Early Action, stated as required for merit consideration. Towson publishes separate in-state and out-of-state award tiers.

Applying by December 1

• Coppin State University, an HBCU in Baltimore with one of the lowest academic entry points in the state for automatic money, plus a named scholarship that reaches full tuition for students who clear a GPA and test threshold.
• Morgan State University, Maryland’s designated public urban research university and an HBCU. December 1 priority, with later consideration possible depending on funding.
• Mount St. Mary’s University, a private in Emmitsburg running a clean five-tier automatic grid with a December 1 priority date and a March 1 final date. Award letters typically go out in mid-January for Early Action applicants.

Rolling or admission-cycle based

• Loyola University Maryland, a private in Baltimore. No separate scholarship deadline; merit is positioned off the first-year admission cycle, and Early Action gives the strongest tier placement.
• University of Maryland Eastern Shore, an HBCU on the Eastern Shore. Awards attach at admission on a rolling basis.

A different model entirely

• United States Naval Academy, Annapolis. There is no merit ladder here because there is no tuition. Midshipmen attend at no cost and receive a stipend, in exchange for a service obligation as a commissioned officer after graduation. Admission runs through a congressional nomination process on its own timeline, entirely separate from everything else on this page, and it is competitive enough that it should be a parallel path rather than a plan. Families should evaluate it as a career commitment first and a financial decision second.

The two-year and transfer pathway

Maryland’s community college route is unusually well built, and for a middle-income family it is often the strongest financial move available.

The Promise Scholarship covers up to $5,000 of remaining tuition and mandatory fees after other aid, for students with an unweighted 2.3 GPA and household income under $100,000 or $150,000 depending on household type. Those are the figures MHEC labels 2025-2026, which is the most recent year its Promise page carries. Three constraints matter. You must attend the community college in your own county, or your region if you live in the service area of Wor-Wic, Chesapeake, or the College of Southern Maryland. The exception is if your local college does not offer your program, in which case you may attend another Maryland community college that does. You must enroll in at least six credits per semester. And renewal requires a 2.5 cumulative college GPA plus six completed credits each semester, with the FAFSA or One-App refiled annually.

On transfer to a Maryland four-year, the 2+2 Transfer Scholarship picks up. It requires a conferred associate degree from a Maryland community college, a 2.5 cumulative GPA, and full-time degree-seeking enrollment at a Maryland four-year. It renews for up to three years or six semesters, whichever is longer, with no new application needed as long as the four-year certifies the student.

Three cautions on the transfer path. First, the timing is rigid: the conferral term of the associate degree and the transfer term have to line up with the aid year, and a student who finishes a semester off-cycle can be pushed into a different award year or out of eligibility. Second, the Rawlings credit completion clock counts credits from the community college years, and the accepting four-year verifies completed credits without re-examining which ones transferred. Third, several Maryland four-years run their own transfer scholarships with their own deadlines, and Towson’s transfer merit consideration runs on a March 1 Transfer Early Action date rather than a fall date. Check both the state program and the college program.

If you live just across the line

Maryland state aid does not travel. The GA Grant, the EA Grant, and the Promise Scholarship all require enrollment at a Maryland institution, with narrow exceptions written for specific circumstances. The legislative scholarships allow out-of-state use only if the major is unavailable anywhere in Maryland and the legislator agrees, or in specific military and disability circumstances. So the state layer is not portable, and a Maryland family sending a student out of state should build the budget on federal aid plus the receiving college’s own aid.

In the other direction, Maryland is worth a look for families in DC, Northern Virginia, Delaware, and southern Pennsylvania. Two things stand out in our data. Towson publishes higher merit awards at every tier for out-of-state students than for Maryland residents, which does not make the net price lower than in-state but does narrow the gap considerably. And the University of Maryland Eastern Shore runs an out-of-state tuition waiver tied to its HBCU initiative. Neither of these requires Maryland residency or a Maryland form.

Maryland also participates in the Academic Common Market, which lets students in participating states pay in-state rates for approved programs not offered in their home state. That runs in both directions and is worth checking if the intended major is unusual.

Smaller Maryland Programs Worth Checking

These are real programs on MHEC’s official list. We have verified that each exists and who it is for, but we have not yet verified current award amounts against primary sources, so we are not publishing figures for them. Each links to MHEC’s own page, where the amount for the current year is posted.

Maryland State Aid FAQs

Does my senior file the 2026-2027 or the 2027-2028 FAFSA?

The 2027-2028 FAFSA. Aid years are named for the year the money is spent, not the year you fill out the form. A student who is a senior during the 2026-2027 school year starts college in fall 2027, which is the 2027-2028 aid year. The 2027-2028 FAFSA is expected to open October 1, 2026 and uses your 2025 tax return. Maryland’s deadline for that form is March 1, 2027.

How much is the Maryland Guaranteed Access Grant?

The GA Grant pays up to 100 percent of a student’s calculated adjusted financial need for the first two years of the award, capped at a maximum MHEC sets each year from the state budget. The 2026-2027 maximum was $18,000 and the minimum award is $100. The 2027-2028 maximum has not been announced. The award is prorated for students living off campus or with a parent, so two students at different schools with different housing can receive very different amounts.

What is the income limit for the Guaranteed Access Grant?

For first-time applicants, family income must be at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty guidelines for the prior-prior tax year. For 2026-2027 that worked out to $33,566 for a household of three, $40,560 for four, and $47,554 for five, with $6,994 added for each person beyond eight. Renewal applicants get a looser test: at or below 150 percent of poverty guidelines, or continued Pell Grant eligibility.

What is the deadline for Maryland state financial aid?

March 1 for the FAFSA or MHEC One-App, and a Maryland college must be listed on that form by the same date. But March 1 is not the only date that matters. Documents requested through MDCAPS are due August 1, the Conroy and Cryor scholarships close July 15, and the legislative scholarships run on deadlines each senator and delegate sets individually. Separately, most Maryland colleges close automatic merit consideration on November 1 or December 1, months before the state deadline.

How do you apply for a Maryland Senatorial Scholarship?

You contact your state senator’s office directly and ask for their application and deadline. There is no statewide form. Look up your district at the Maryland General Assembly website, and note that this is your state senator in Annapolis, not a U.S. senator. Some senators run their own selection process and some ask the MHEC Office of Student Financial Assistance to award on their behalf, in which case the FAFSA has to be filed by March 1. File by March 1 either way. Required documents go to the senator’s office, not to MHEC.

Can you get both a Senatorial and a Delegate Scholarship?

Yes. They are separately funded programs and both may be held alongside all other state awards, subject to the cap on total state awards. You have one state senator and three state delegates, and a student may receive more than one Delegate Scholarship. The Senatorial Scholarship can renew for up to three years. The Delegate Scholarship does not renew at all, so you reapply to your delegates every year.

Does Maryland have a merit scholarship for good grades?

Not at the state level. Maryland has no statewide merit program comparable to Tennessee’s HOPE Scholarship or Florida’s Bright Futures. The state’s largest awards read income and enrollment, not GPA or test scores. Merit money in Maryland comes from the colleges, awarded off the admission application, which is why the college’s Early Action deadline decides more of a strong student’s package than any state form does. Individual legislators may weigh merit in their scholarship decisions, but there is no published statewide merit criterion.

Can you lose the Guaranteed Access Grant?

Yes, and in more than one way. Missing the August 1 document deadline in MDCAPS can end an award that was already offered. Failing to refile the FAFSA by March 1 each year ends renewal. Failing the institution’s satisfactory academic progress standard ends it. And starting in the third year of the award, completing fewer than 30 credits in a year reduces the award by ratio, while completing fewer than 24 ends eligibility permanently. MHEC states that eligibility lost that way cannot be regained in a later year.

Sources and Verification

Every figure on this page was verified on August 27, 2026 against the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC), Office of Student Financial Assistance, 217 East Redwood Street, Suite 2100, Baltimore, MD 21202. Phone 410-767-3300 or 800-974-0203. Email osfamail.mhec@maryland.gov.

• MHEC State Financial Aid Programs and Applications
• MHEC Scholarship and Grant Deadlines
• Guaranteed Access Grant, 2026-2027
• Educational Assistance Grant, 2026-2027
• Campus-Based Educational Assistance Grant
• Senatorial Scholarship, 2026-2027
• Delegate Scholarship, 2026-2027
• Community College Promise Scholarship
• 2+2 Transfer Scholarship
• Conroy and Cryor Memorial Scholarships
• MHEC Credit Completion Requirements, updated October 2025 (PDF)
• MDCAPS, the Maryland College Aid Processing System
• Maryland General Assembly district and member lookup
• How we build and audit our college data

College-level deadlines come from our own database, audited against each institution’s published admission and scholarship pages. Award amounts, income thresholds, and deadlines in Maryland are set annually and can change with the state budget or a legislative session. Confirm any figure that will drive a family decision directly with MHEC or the college before you rely on it. If you find something on this page that is out of date or wrong, email leo@collegereadyparent.org and we will check it against the source and correct it.

Written by Leo Dimilo
I started CollegeReadyParent while working through college costs for my own kid, and quickly figured out that the number a school advertises and the number a family actually pays are two very different things. Since then I've gone school by school pulling apart award letters, scholarship pages, and cost sheets to find what families are supposed to just know. This site is the version of that research I wish someone had handed me. More about Leo →