While anyone who wants to be eligible for federal student loans and Pell Grants has to fill out the FAFSA (officially: Free Application for Federal Student Aid), only students attending certain colleges need to worry about the CSS Profile. As such, it’s a less commonly discussed part of the college application journey.
What is the CSS Profile?
A product of the testing giant the College Board (which runs the SATs), the CSS Profile is the application required to access grants and scholarships from about 250 colleges. Each year, the profile gives access to more than $10 billion in financial aid to thousands of students, according to the College Board.
How is the CSS Profile different from the FAFSA?
The CSS Profile looks at every part of a family’s finances that the FAFSA considers: income, bank accounts (and any interest they earn) and assets.
But the CSS Profile goes much further than the FAFSA. It also considers the value of a family’s primary residence, if it owns one, retirement savings and any annuities. In addition to taking a deeper, more detailed look at your family’s finances than the FAFSA, the CSS Profile considers a greater percentage of those assets as part of what you can afford to pay for college expenses.
“The biggest difference I tell people is that it’s super invasive,” says Christine McMullan, a college financial aid advisor with Garretson Financial in Kenilworth, New Jersey. “They’re really looking at every part of your financial picture.”
The CSS Profile is also more flexible than the FAFSA. Colleges use the FAFSA in a fairly standard way. After filling out the FAFSA with information on your family income, assets and family size, you’ll get a number called your Student Aid Index, or SAI. (This is new terminology this year; it used to be called the Expected Family Contribution). Your financial need is defined as the difference between a college’s cost of attendance and your SAI.
Your financial need, in turn, determines your aid eligibility for federal grants, work-study or subsidized federal student loans. Some colleges may also use the FAFSA to award their own scholarship money, but they’re always doing so based on that same measure of financial need.
Colleges can be much more flexible in how they handle the results of the CSS Profile. One college might weigh various parts of your financial information differently than another. Individual colleges can even add their own supplemental questions to the form.
Who has to fill out the CSS Profile?
More than 200 highly selective schools use the CSS Profile, which helps determine eligibility for aid from the college’s own funds. The vast majority of profile schools are private colleges, though a few elite public schools, like the University of Michigan and University of Virginia, also require the profile.
You can see an up-to-date list of participating institutions at collegeboard.org. If your child is applying to one of those schools or is already enrolled and plans to attend next year, you should complete both the FAFSA and the CSS Profile. Some colleges only require international students to fill out this financial aid application.
Note that in a typical year, the FAFSA and the CSS Profile are released at the same time, so families typically fill out the FAFSA first and then work on the profile. But this year, the release of the FAFSA was delayed by three months to give officials more time to finalize a major overhaul of the federal financial aid form.
What information do you need to answer the form’s questions?
The CSS Profile asks for all the information the FAFSA requires and adds questions about annuities, home equity, retirement funds and sibling assets to build a full financial aid profile. Before you start the application process, gather the necessary documents. You’ll need information about your family’s finances, including:
- Federal tax returns (for the 2024-25 form, you’ll need your 2022 tax forms)
- W-2 or 1099 forms for the past two years, to show parents’ income
- Current balance amounts for savings accounts, checking accounts, stocks, bonds, trusts, and UTMA/UGMA accounts for both parents and student
- Current 529 plan values for all children in the home
- Information about your retirement accounts (whether that’s a 401(k), IRA, 403(b), pension, or some combination of those), including most recent annual contributions and account balances
- Information about your primary home and any investment or vacation properties, including how much you paid, what you owe on any mortgages, and what each property is currently worth
The CSS Profile asks a lot of questions about how much you earn and own, but it also asks for information about your major expenses. The goal is to create a full financial picture, McMullan says, so gather any documentation you have around items like medical expenses, private school tuition, mortgage payments and other debts.
While the CSS Profile typically takes families longer to complete than the FAFSA, the level of detail the form requires can be to your benefit, since it gives you a chance to explain your financial situation, she says. (After gathering your documents, McMullan recommends setting aside a couple hours to fill it out.)
How much does the CSS Profile cost?
It costs $25 to submit the CSS Profile to one college. Submitting the profile to additional schools costs $16 each. Families with adjusted gross incomes of $100,000 or less can fill out the form for free, as can students who qualified for a fee waiver on the SAT. You’ll be notified if you qualify for a fee waiver when you fill out the form.
When is the CSS Profile due?
You can begin filling out the CSS Profile each year on Oct. 1 for the following academic year. Schools set their own, individual CSS Profile deadlines, so check with the colleges where you’re applying to find out when you’ll need to have it done. Most schools’ deadlines are between Jan. 1 and March 31, or during the first quarter of 2024 for students planning to attend college in the fall of 2024.
Plan to complete the submission by two weeks before the deadline. “You might as well be in the early part of the line for money,” says Jim Shagawat, a financial advisor in Paramus, NJ.
Tips for filling out the CSS Profile Application
The FAFSA gets a bad rap for being complicated, but the CSS Profile is even longer and more complex. Start by logging into your College Board account that you used to sign up for the SATs, or create a new account if you don’t have one. Then gather your bank statements, W-2 forms and other paperwork outlined above.
To make it easier on yourself, read the directions, fill out the whole profile, and upload all the supporting documents, says Jason Anderson, a Kansas-based college and student loan planner previously told Money. Give yourself plenty of time to assemble everything you’ll need.
“This isn’t exactly like the FAFSA, which runs on the honor system, plus retrieving information from the IRS,” Anderson says. “The CSS wants the documents.”