University of Florida Scholarships (2026–2027)

📅 2027–2028 Planning Note: The costs below reflect the most recently published figures (2026–2027). Universities typically finalize the next year’s rates in the spring, and we’ll update this page once official 2027–2028 numbers are released.

Planning tip: At large public universities, tuition, fees, and housing usually increase modestly each year (often in the 2–5% range). For early budgeting, families may want to plan for roughly $1,000–$1,500 more in-state or $2,000–$3,000 more out-of-state in total direct costs once new rates are published.

Average Federal Net Price: $11,740 — this is what families actually paid after grants and scholarships (no loans), based on the most recent federal data. Your specific cost could be significantly lower or higher depending on your financial aid eligibility and merit scholarships. New to Net Price & SAI? Read our guide.

📌 Regional Tuition & Waiver Options

UF’s non-resident tuition and fees went from $30,900 to $34,620 for 2026-27, a jump of about 12 percent in a single year. In-state barely moved, from $6,380 to $6,440. If you are an out-of-state family, that one change is worth roughly $14,900 over four years, and it is larger than most of the merit awards UF hands out. Budget from the new number, not last year’s.

Florida law lets an out-of-state student waive non-resident tuition and fees if one of their grandparents is a legal Florida resident. At current rates that is worth about $28,180 a year, which is more than UF’s single largest out-of-state merit award. There is no essay and no committee. It is an eligibility and paperwork check.

Two things will disqualify a student who otherwise fits. First, they must apply as a freshman for the summer or fall term immediately following high school graduation, so a gap year closes this door. Second, there is a hard academic floor: an SAT, ACT, or CLT score at or above the 89th national percentile. That is a testing decision your student needs to make in junior year, not senior year.

We say that plainly because families arrive at this page expecting one. UF’s Financial Aid office states directly that there is no automatic awarding of UF scholarships based on test scores or GPA. Every merit award at UF, from the smallest $1,000 Florida Merit Scholarship to the full-ride Stamps package, comes out of a committee review.

📅 The UF Money Calendar (Simple Version)

• October 15: Early Decision application deadline. Binding. Decision December 11, confirm by January 8.
• November 1: Early Action deadline, and the real one for money. This is the priority deadline for merit consideration, and it is the last day to apply to the Honors Program in a way that keeps Lombardi and Stamps on the table.
• November 8: Materials deadline for Early Action. Transcript record and test scores due.
• January 15: Regular Decision deadline. Still eligible for merit, no longer eligible for Lombardi or Stamps.
• Early to mid-March: Merit scholarship offers go out by email. Silence means no award.
• May 1: Enrollment confirmation, $200 deposit, and official test scores due.

Parent rule of thumb at UF: treat November 1 as the deadline that decides your family’s cost, even though the money answer does not arrive until March. Everything expensive is decided by what your student submitted that day.

🧭 So where does the money actually come from at UF?

Since there is no automatic merit to chase, families do better redirecting that energy to the three things at UF that are far more predictable than the committee:

1. Florida residents: Bright Futures. It is earned in high school through coursework, GPA, test scores, and service hours, and Florida Academic Scholars covers full tuition and fees. This is the single biggest lever, and it has nothing to do with UF.
2. Out-of-state with a Florida grandparent: the Grandparent Waiver, worth about $28,000 a year, gated by an 89th percentile test score.
3. Everyone: the departmental and donor scholarships in the Hidden Gems section, which run on their own applications and deadlines and are the awards most students never apply for.

UF’s two largest scholarships, Lombardi and Stamps, are only available to students admitted to the Honors Program through Early Decision or Early Action. UF Honors states it plainly: Regular Decision applicants are not eligible for Lombardi or Stamps consideration. And the Honors essay lives inside the UF application, which means it cannot be added after submission.

So a family that applies January 15, or applies November 1 but skips the optional Honors essay, has permanently removed their student from the two biggest awards UF offers. Nobody sends a warning email about it.

❓ Flagship / Competitive Scholarship FAQs

Is the Benacquisto Scholarship really a free ride at UF?
For Florida-resident National Merit Scholars, essentially yes. The state-funded award covers UF’s published in-state cost of attendance minus Bright Futures and minus the qualifying National Merit award. The mechanics matter: your student must reach Finalist, then name UF as first choice with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation by May 31. UF then awards a $500 college-sponsored National Merit Scholarship, and that $500 is the trigger that unlocks Benacquisto. Two caveats. The Florida Legislature re-funds the program annually, so terms can shift. And Benacquisto does not cover summer coursework.

Is Benacquisto available to out-of-state National Merit Finalists?
No. Benacquisto is a Florida program for in-state high school graduates. An out-of-state Finalist gets UF’s $500 National Merit Scholarship and whatever out-of-state tuition scholarship the committee awards, which is a very different picture. This trips up a lot of families comparing UF against schools like Alabama that offer large out-of-state National Merit packages.

What is the difference between Lombardi and Stamps?
They come from the same applicant pool and share the same four funded summer enrichment experiences, worth about $18,000. The money differs sharply. Stamps Scholars receive funding valued up to the full cost of attendance for up to four years plus $10,000 in experiential funding. Lombardi Scholars receive a $7,000 annual stipend. Stamps is the larger award, and Stamps Scholars also join a national scholar network across partner universities.

How does a student get invited to apply for Lombardi or Stamps?
Be admitted to UF and to the Honors Program through Early Decision or Early Action. Invited students get an email from UF Financial Aid with the Preeminent Scholars application. Finalists interview in person during Preeminent Scholars Weekend in early March. The committee reviews only the scholarship application, not the UF admission file, so the essays your student writes for it stand on their own.

Can transfer students win Lombardi or Stamps?
No. Transfers are not eligible. Students who earn a high school diploma and an Associate of Arts or 60 college credits at the same time and enter UF as freshmen are eligible.

Who should be looking hard at Machen Florida Opportunity Scholars?
First-generation Florida students whose family income is under $55,000 and assets under $35,000. The program is designed so recipients do not have to work or borrow, and it wraps in advising and mentoring that measurably improves graduation rates. The sequence is: get admitted as a first-year student, file the FAFSA, and if the initial screen is met, UF invites the supplemental form. Renewal income ceilings rise each year, from $60,500 in year two up to $71,500 in year four.

Is the Presidential Scholarship open to out-of-state students?
UF’s two offices currently say different things. The Financial Aid site lists the Presidential tiers under scholarships for in-state students. The Admissions site describes them as merit awards for high-achieving students with no residency language. We are flagging the conflict rather than guessing. If your student is out-of-state, ask Admissions directly.

Are these awards renewable?
The Presidential tiers, Florida Merit Scholarships, and out-of-state tuition scholarships are structured across four years (fall and spring terms). One important condition on the out-of-state scholarships: if your student’s residency is later reclassified to in-state, the award is cancelled, because its whole purpose was to offset non-resident tuition.

👵 The Grandparent Waiver: UF’s most valuable overlooked award

This is not a scholarship, which is exactly why families miss it. It is a residency mechanism created by the Florida Legislature in 2021, and it lives on UF’s residency page rather than any scholarship page.

If your student has a grandparent who is a legal Florida resident, UF can waive out-of-state tuition and fees for up to 110 percent of the degree hours. At 2026-27 rates that is roughly $28,180 per year, or about $112,000 across a four-year degree. UF’s largest out-of-state merit scholarship, Gator Nation, is $20,000 a year and requires winning a committee. The waiver requires paperwork.

What has to be true:

• The grandparent must be the natural or adopted parent, or legal guardian, of your student’s parent, and a legal Florida resident.
• Your student must apply as a freshman for the summer or fall term immediately following high school graduation. A gap year closes this door.
• Your student needs an SAT, ACT, or CLT score at or above the 89th national percentile. This is the piece that requires planning in junior year.
• Request the waiver application from Admissions after submitting the admission application. Students who already qualify as Florida residents should not use this.

🧠 Parent Strategy: UF’s second scholarship season

Most families stop looking in March when the merit email either arrives or does not. That is the mistake. UF’s departmental and donor money runs on a completely separate calendar, and much of it opens after your student is already enrolled.

1. File the FAFSA. UF’s Financial Aid office automatically considers students for a large pool of endowed and non-endowed scholarships if they filed the FAFSA, show need, and carry a 3.0 GPA. No separate application. Skipping the FAFSA because you assume you will not qualify removes your student from that entire pool.
2. Use UF’s scholarship search engine, which lists both UF college-awarded aid and outside scholarships in one place.
3. Go to the college and department website for your student’s actual major. Engineering runs its own portal with a September window. Business runs a February to March window. Liberal Arts and Sciences donor awards mostly close in late March. These do not talk to each other.
4. Look at Gator Clubs. UF’s regional alumni clubs award their own scholarships, criteria and deadlines vary by club, and the applicant pools are tiny because they are geographically limited.
5. Save confirmations. Departmental awards frequently require a separate acceptance step after notification.

Parent translation: at UF, the student who spends four hours in September of freshman year filling out departmental applications often ends up with more money than the student who did nothing after March.

❓ Hidden Gems FAQ

Do these stack with a Presidential award or an out-of-state scholarship?
Generally yes, up to UF’s cost of attendance. Departmental and donor awards are meant to fill gaps rather than replace central awards. Read the award letter anyway, because occasionally a single scholarship reduces another form of institutional aid.

My student is a freshman. Is it too early or too late for most of these?
Neither, but the timing is different from what you expect. The Grandparent Waiver and the First Generation Matching Grant matter at application time. The engineering, business, and liberal arts donor awards, the University Scholars research stipend, and the study abroad grants are aimed at enrolled students, so they open once your student is on campus and has a declared major. Both waves matter.

What is the First Generation Matching Grant and how do we apply?
It is a need-based grant for first-generation undergraduates, funded through a state matching program. There is no separate application. Eligible students are awarded automatically based on FAFSA data and need, which is one more reason to file the FAFSA even if you expect nothing.

Is the University Scholars Program only for Honors students?
No, and this is the most common misconception about it. It is run by UF’s Center for Undergraduate Research and is open to UF undergraduates generally. Your student pairs with a faculty mentor, designs a year-long project, and receives a stipend in the $1,750 to $2,000 range. The work gets published in the UF Journal of Undergraduate Research and presented at the annual symposium, which matters as much as the money for anyone heading toward graduate or professional school.

Are ROTC scholarships worth considering here?
UF hosts Air Force, Army, and Navy and Marine Corps units. These can cover full tuition and stack with other aid up to cost of attendance, but they carry a service obligation and require U.S. citizenship. Army high school boards typically run in early January, with Air Force and Navy boards spread across fall and spring. This is a family decision long before it is a financial one.

What if we miss a departmental deadline?
Most are final for that cycle, and most run annually. Missing September in engineering usually means waiting until the following September rather than losing the award forever. Contact the department directly, since some run appeal windows or late exceptions.

For the 2026 entering class, UF Honors received more than 21,000 applications and admitted 1,976 students, roughly a 9 percent admit rate. The middle 50 percent of admitted Honors students had an ACT of 35 to 36, an SAT of 1520 to 1560, and a GPA of 4.6 to 4.8. UF overall admits around one in five. Honors admits around one in eleven.

It is tied to an invitation to the University Research Scholars Program, a research-focused cohort that selects its own list of admits. It arrives as a $2,000 residential tuition waiver, $500 waived each fall and spring term, and it applies to Florida residents and non-residents alike. There is no separate application. One caveat for Florida Prepaid families: because it is a waiver, it reduces what gets billed to the Prepaid account rather than putting money in your student’s hands.

• Research and travel mini-grants: $500 to $1,500 for Honors research projects and conference travel. Requires a defined project and a faculty mentor.
• Honors Undergraduate Thesis support: Stipends and grants for the direct costs of a thesis, including materials, participant compensation, and archive travel.
• National fellowships mentoring: Not cash from UF, but coaching and institutional endorsement for Goldwater, Fulbright, Truman, Marshall, and Rhodes. For students aiming at those, the mentorship is worth more than a stipend.

This started with a supercomputer. NVIDIA co-founder and UF alumnus Chris Malachowsky donated $25 million, NVIDIA matched it, UF added $15 million, and the state added $20 million in recurring faculty funding. The result was HiPerGator, which at launch was the most powerful AI supercomputer in higher education. UF then did the unusual part: instead of keeping it inside computer science, it built AI instruction into every college.

Today that means 230-plus AI-designated courses across all 16 colleges, more than 300 AI-focused faculty, roughly 12,000 to 14,000 students enrolled in AI coursework each year, and an AI certificate covering fundamentals, ethics, and an applied course in the student’s own field, open regardless of major. A nursing major, a journalism major, or an agriculture major can graduate from UF with documented AI coursework. That is rare, and in the current job market it is the kind of thing a hiring manager notices.

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