Every week someone asks us for the grant that will pay to open their trade school. The one that writes a check to a brand-new school for its building and equipment mostly does not exist. What does exist is a set of workforce programs that will pay for your students, your employer partners' training, and in some cases your staff, once your school is set up to receive them.
We have helped clients secure more than $10 million through those programs. Here is how they actually work.
The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act is federal money that flows through every state's workforce boards to pay for training that leads to a job. A student who qualifies walks into a workforce office and the state pays your tuition.
The catch is that your school and each program have to be on your state's Eligible Training Provider List, and getting listed is its own application, judged on whether your program matches the occupations the local board is funding and whether you can report outcomes. Schools on the list can fill cohorts with it. Schools that are not on it never see a dollar.
On-the-job training grants reimburse an employer for part of a new hire's wages while they learn. Incumbent worker training grants pay for upskilling the staff a company already has. Neither is paid to the school directly, but a school that knows how to bring these to its employer partners becomes the training provider those employers send people to, and that is a pipeline most schools never build. We wrote a full guide on these here.
Every state has a VR agency that funds training for people with disabilities, and it pays schools directly for approved programs. It is a steady, under-used source of enrollments for schools that get set up for it.
Federal startup grants for private for-profit schools. Grants that pay for a building. Grants you can get before you are licensed. If a website is promising those, be careful. The path is license first, ETPL second, then the funding starts.
None of this is available on day one, and all of it depends on decisions you make during licensing: which programs you offer, how you describe them, how your outcomes will be tracked. Set the school up with funding in mind from the start and the approvals stack. Set it up without and you will be rebuilding documents a year in.
Tell us your state and where your school is, whether that is an idea, an application in progress, or a licensed school that is not on the ETPL yet. We will tell you which of these programs you could qualify for and what it would take. Use the button below or email info@tradeschoolsecrets.co.
Tell us your state and where your school is at, whether that is an idea, an application in progress, or a licensed school not on the ETPL yet.
See If You Qualify →