How CHOOSE Act payments reach you, what an ESA invoice has to include, and how to handle an invoice that runs over a student’s balance.
Yes. Every education service provider — including a participating school — sets its own payment policy. The CHOOSE Act program does not impose a payment schedule, so you can ask for payment up front, bill in installments, or follow whatever terms you already use.
What the program does expect is clarity. Communicate your payment policy to families before they enroll or buy, so a CHOOSE Act family knows exactly what is due and when. Clear terms up front prevent the confusion that turns into a payment dispute later.
Related: Activate your provider listing
No. The CHOOSE Act program has no reimbursement. A family cannot pay you out of pocket and then claim that money back from their student’s ESA.
Every CHOOSE Act payment and purchase has to move directly to you through the ClassWallet platform. If a family pays you another way first, those dollars cannot be recovered from the ESA — so make sure families understand this before they pay you outside ClassWallet.
Related: CHOOSE Act parent guide
Payment runs through ClassWallet, and it is more of a compliance process than a simple hand-off. First, finish your registration with ClassWallet — without it, no payments can be made. Then you give the family an invoice, the family uploads it in ClassWallet, and the program administration reviews and approves it before any money moves. Once it is approved, ClassWallet sends your payment by ACH.
The review step is where invoices get held up. To be approved, an invoice has to carry every one of these details, and each one has to be right:
On paper it is a short list. In practice, a missing date of service, a name that does not match the student’s ESA, or a vague description of the service is enough to stall a payment — and the program reviews every invoice, every time. Getting it exactly right, on every invoice, is the genuinely hard part of this.
This is the part of the job the CHOOSEActAL invoice tool is built to carry. A family sends you their request through the tool, it is checked against these requirements as it is built, and it reaches you ready to review and approve — so you are not hand-auditing a PDF before it ever gets to ClassWallet. The program administration still has the final say on approval.
Related: Activate your provider listing
No. There is no separate CHOOSE Act invoice format, and no need to label an invoice as a CHOOSE Act one. A participating student’s invoice should look the same as any other student’s — as long as it carries the required details (the seven items listed in the payment question above, also covered in the ESP Guide).
So you do not need to build or download a special template. What you need is an invoice that reaches the family cleanly and comes back to you ready to approve.
That is how the CHOOSEActAL invoice tool works. Instead of emailing a template back and forth, you point the family to the tool and they submit their order through it. The request lands with you directly — already structured around the required details — to review, adjust if needed, and approve. One place, no template to maintain.
Related: Activate your provider listing
Yes. Your invoice can total more than what is left in a student’s CHOOSE Act ESA. When the family loads the invoice into ClassWallet, they enter the amount they are requesting from the ESA — so the ESA can pay part of an invoice rather than all of it.
The family is responsible for any educational costs above their ESA balance. Confirm with the family how the remainder will be paid, so the gap between the invoice total and the ESA payment does not surprise anyone.
Setting refund policies for CHOOSE Act students, returning a refund to a student’s ESA, and notifying ALDOR when a participating student leaves.
You set your own refund policy. Every education service provider, participating schools included, decides its own refund terms — the program does not impose one.
There is one rule of fairness: your refund policy for CHOOSE Act students has to be the same as your refund policy for everyone else. You cannot apply different refund terms because a student is a CHOOSE Act participant.
When a refund is due, it goes back to the student’s ESA — not to the family directly. ALDOR publishes the steps for returning funds to a participating student’s ESA; follow that process so the money lands where it belongs.
A participating school has to notify the Alabama Department of Revenue (ALDOR) within 10 business days whenever a participating student is no longer enrolled — whether they graduated, withdrew, or left for any other reason.
You make that notification using the CHOOSE Act Alabama Student Un-Enrollment Form for Participating Schools. The 10-business-day window is short, so build the form into your normal withdrawal and graduation process rather than treating it as an afterthought.
Related: For participating schools
It depends on your own policy and your contract. The CHOOSE Act program does not require a participating school to refund mid-year tuition; you set your refund terms, the same way you would for any student.
If a refund is due because your contract with the family calls for one, it goes back to the student’s ESA, following ALDOR’s published process for returning funds to an ESA. The contract you sign with any family still governs — CHOOSE Act participation does not change it — and your refund terms have to be the same for CHOOSE Act and non-CHOOSE Act students alike.
Becoming a CHOOSE Act provider or participating school — what it costs, serving your own student, tuition rules, testing, award timing, and where to find help.
ALDOR notifies families of their award eligibility by email. For the 2025 program year, those emails began going out on May 1 — check the current Family Application Timeline for the year you are planning around.
For you as a provider, that spring notification is the signal that families know their status and are ready to act. Expect enrollment conversations and payment questions to pick up once awards go out, well before the school year starts.
Related: CHOOSE Act parent guide
A participating student enrolled in a participating school who has submitted enrollment verification receives $7,000. A participating student in a home education program receives $2,000, capped at $4,000 per family.
Funds are placed in the student’s education savings account at the start of the program year — for the 2025 program year, deposits began July 1, 2025. A family’s ESA money is generally available around the start of the school year, not before, so plan any payment-timing conversations around that.
Related: CHOOSE Act parent guide
Not directly. Program rules say the parent of a participating student cannot be paid for services or products they provide to that student while acting as the student’s education service provider. You cannot pay yourself from your own student’s ESA for your own services.
There is one allowance: a parent who is an employee of an education service provider — including a participating school — may use their own student’s ESA to pay that provider or school. The payment goes to the organization, not to the parent acting as the provider.
Participating schools carry a set of requirements beyond those for other education service providers — covering enrollment verification, un-enrollment notification, testing, and non-discrimination in tuition, among others. ALDOR publishes a full summary of the requirements for participating schools.
Read that summary closely before your first CHOOSE Act enrollment, then revisit it each year. The refund, un-enrollment, tuition, and testing questions in this FAQ cover the points participating schools ask about most.
Related: For participating schools
No. There is no fee to become an education service provider or participating school with CHOOSE Act Alabama, and no fee to receive CHOOSE Act funds through DirectPay. Joining the program and getting paid through it does not cost you anything.
Listing your organization on CHOOSEActAL so families can find you costs nothing either. Activating your profile takes a couple of minutes and is open to every approved provider and participating school.
Related: Activate your provider listing | For participating schools
No. A participating school cannot discriminate against participating students when it sets tuition or fees. The tuition you charge a CHOOSE Act student has to be the same tuition you would charge any other student (see Section 16-6J-5, Code of Alabama 1975).
In short: same tuition, same fees, regardless of how a family pays. This pairs with the refund rule — your refund terms also have to be the same for CHOOSE Act and non-CHOOSE Act students.
Not necessarily a standardized test. The CHOOSE Act allows testing that aligns with your participating school’s curriculum as one of its testing options, and early grades fall under that option. A kindergarten or first-grade student would typically have a pass/fail goal rather than a standardized or benchmark test.
Across grades, a participating student must take one of three things, chosen by the school: a standardized assessment aligned with the school’s curriculum, a nationally norm-referenced assessment, or a nationally recognized aptitude assessment. Students with special needs, for whom standardized testing is not appropriate, are exempt from the testing requirements.
The Requirements for Participating Schools document covers testing in more detail — check it for the current year’s specifics.
Related: For participating schools
ALDOR publishes the core documents on the CHOOSE Act Alabama website: the Education Service Provider Guide, the Parent Guide, and the program FAQ documents. For general questions about the program or the ClassWallet platform, ClassWallet support is at [email protected] or 877-969-5536, Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. CT and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. CT.
CHOOSEActAL puts the same ground in a faster form. You can search every approved provider and participating school in the directory, look up whether a specific expense is eligible in the Expense Explorer, and point families to a plain-language guide — without digging through PDFs.
Related: Search the Expense Explorer | Browse the provider directory | Official CHOOSE Act resources