Most people assume every US state requires 180 school days. The statutes say otherwise. We opened the current law or state board rule for all 50 states and DC in October 2026 and put the result in one CSV: https://github.com/RB9744/us-school-days-by-state

What is in it (51 rows):

  • state, min_days, min_hours_per_year (by grade band where the law splits them), rule (days, hours, or districts may pick), start_date_rule, changed_since_2023, law (the section to look up)
  • CSV and JSON, CC BY 4.0, no dependencies

A few things that surprised us:

  • only 28 states actually write "180 days" into the rule; 12 states set no statewide day count and count hours instead (Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Missouri, Wisconsin among them)
  • Colorado has the lowest day minimum at 160, Kansas the highest at 186 for grades K-11
  • Texas does not count days or hours but minutes: 75,600 per year
  • 12 states let districts choose between days and hours, 12 require both
  • eleven states changed their rule since 2023, for example Oklahoma (181 days or 1,086 hours, 2025) and South Carolina (added a 1,080-hour rule in 2024)

Quick start:

import pandas as pd url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RB9744/us-school-days-by-state/main/data/school-days-by-state-2026.csv" df = pd.read_csv(url) df[df.rule.str.contains("hours", case=False)][["state", "min_hours_per_year"]]

Two caveats from the research: Oregon is rewriting its instructional time rules after an April 2026 order from the governor, and West Virginia's 900-hour rule only starts on 1 July 2027.

The same files are on Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/rbkhanni/us-school-days-per-year-by-state-2026) and Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Rbkhanni/us-school-days-by-state).

The live table with a link to every statute is on GradeKind (https://gradekind.com/school-days-by-state.html), next to a school-days-left counter for teachers. That page is why the dataset exists: teachers kept asking how many days their state really requires, and the answer was spread across 51 different websites.

If a state changes its rule, open an issue with the statute link and we will update the row.