The Tuition Bill Hiding in Your Broward Home Price

In Weston, about 9 out of every 100 school-age kids attend private school. In Plantation, it is 25. Cooper City sits under 8. Fort Lauderdale is close to 22.

Those figures come from Census data that Broward County Public Schools compiled for its own board, and they describe something about local housing that rarely gets said out loud.

For two decades buyers here have paid more for certain addresses. Weston. Parkland. Cooper City. Everyone understands why, and most people accept it as the price of admission. What gets left out of that conversation is what the family two zip codes over is paying instead.

A house in a zone where a quarter of the neighbors go private is not actually cheaper. It is cheaper on the closing statement. Then tuition starts. Average private school tuition in Broward runs $14,857 a year, and $19,166 at the high school level. Multiply by the number of kids and the number of years, and you land on a figure that looks a lot like the premium you thought you dodged.

The real question underneath all of it is which check you would rather write, and to whom.

What changed

Florida made its school voucher universal. No income cap. No requirement that the child attended a public school first. The Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options runs roughly $8,000 per student for 2026-27, and it follows the child to any participating private school in the state. Your address is irrelevant to it.

Eight thousand dollars covers a little more than half of that average Broward tuition. Across a full K-12 run it comes to about $104,000 per child. Two kids, call it $208,000.

I have worked through four market cycles in this county. I have not seen a subsidy of that size land on one side of a housing decision before. It does not erase the premium on a Weston or Parkland home, and I would not tell you it does. Those markets have plenty holding them up beyond the schools. But it changes the arithmetic a buyer ought to be running.

What families actually did

Broward students using this voucher went from 1,821 in 2019-20 to 35,491 last school year. District enrollment fell by another 11,000 students on the first day of class this month.

One honest caveat, because I would rather be accurate than dramatic. The district's own analysis found that most vouchers went to families already enrolled in private school. So this is not tens of thousands of people abandoning their zoned school. It is the state picking up part of a bill those families were already paying. That makes the effect on housing slower. It does not make it smaller.

What to do with it

If you are buying, price the whole thing. Purchase price, taxes, insurance, and the education line, with the voucher counted against it. I have watched clients stretch six figures on a house for a school zone without ever pricing the alternative. Sometimes the stretch still wins. Sometimes it does not, and they find out three years later.

If you are selling outside one of the premium zones, this is an argument in your favor and almost nobody is making it. The old objection about the assigned school now comes with a state-funded answer attached to it.

If you already own in Weston or Parkland, none of this says sell. It says know which legs your value is standing on. School reputation is one of them, and that leg carries slightly less weight than it did in 2019.

Run your own numbers before you take anyone's word for it, mine included. And talk to your CPA about how any of this touches your own tax picture.

Happy to walk through the math on a specific address if that would help.

Roger Averbuj, Broker | Prestige Heritage Realty | (954) 663-8461

Source: Broward County Public Schools, Redefining Our Schools