FY2026 HEP Competition Opens With $11.55M and a 25-Day Window for Migrant Farmworker Programs

Community colleges and nonprofit workforce providers running migrant farmworker education programs have until 11:59:59 p.m. Eastern on June 12, 2026 to compete for a slice of $11.55 million in FY2026 High School Equivalency Program awards, according to the notice posted to the Federal Register on May 18.

That gives serious applicants — and the institutional grants offices that support them — roughly 25 days to assemble a competitive proposal for one of the country's longest-running migrant education funding streams.

A 25-day window for Assistance Listing 84.141A

The notice itself is short by Federal Register standards: a two-page filing, document number 2026-09931, scheduled for publication on May 18, 2026 and pointing applicants to Grants.gov for the full opportunity package. Its abstract identifies the program as the High School Equivalency Program operating under Assistance Listing 84.141A, the same CFDA number that has funded HEP grantees since the Office of Migrant Education was established within the Department of Education.

What is unusual is the procedural framing. The Federal Register abstract describes the notice as coming through the Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration, which is "seeking applications for administering FY 2026 HEP … on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education." For institutional grants offices that have applied in prior HEP cycles run directly by ED's Office of Migrant Education, the cross-agency footer is worth a careful read. The substance — eligibility, allowable activities, the statutory definition of "migratory or seasonal farmworker" — is unchanged, but applicants should plan to monitor both ED's HEP page and DOL/ETA channels for application FAQs and clarifications during the open window.

The deadline is firm: applications must be submitted via Grants.gov by 11:59:59 p.m. ET on June 12, 2026. There is no rolling cycle, no second-window extension built into the notice, and no indication that paper submissions will be accepted.

$11.55 million split across three or four awards

The FY2026 pool is small enough that every dollar — and every applicant's geographic footprint — matters. The Department of Education's HEP landing page lists FY2026 program funding at $11,550,000, with an estimated three to four new awards expected from this competition. Individual award ceilings are set at $550,000 per 12-month budget period and minimums at $180,000 per 12-month budget period.

A few things follow mechanically from that math. First, the typical grant is going to land in the upper half of the range — there is not enough money in the pot for many minimum-size projects, especially given HEP's labor-intensive recruitment and counseling model. Second, the FY2026 notice scopes only a single 12-month budget period, even though HEP awards have historically functioned as five-year continuation grants. Applicants should write to the 12 months in front of them while showing the Department a credible multi-year trajectory.

The 25-day window also implies that this is, in practice, a returning-applicant-friendly competition. Institutions that have run an HEP project in the past, or that have shadowed a CAMP project on the same campus, will have most of the required statewide farmworker labor-market data, partnership letters, and persistence-tracking infrastructure already in place. First-time applicants are not excluded, but they should be realistic: a defensible 60-to-80-page narrative built from scratch in three and a half weeks is a heavy lift.

It is also worth noting what is not in the notice: any mention of priority points for serving Opportunity Zones, rural-designated counties, or specific high-need agricultural regions. Where prior HEP competitions have used competitive preference priorities to steer awards toward underserved geographies, the FY2026 abstract does not flag those add-ons. Applicants should assume that selection criteria will track the standard absolute and competitive preference language published in the full Grants.gov package — and read those criteria closely when the package drops.

Why HEP is not CAMP — and why community colleges win it

HEP and the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP, Assistance Listing 84.149A) are often discussed in the same breath and frequently run by the same Office of Migrant Education-funded units on a campus. They are not the same competition.

HEP serves migratory and seasonal farmworkers, or immediate family members of such workers, who are 16 years of age or older and not currently enrolled in school. Its statutory purpose, quoted in the notice and program guidance, is "to assist migratory or seasonal farmworkers (or immediate family members of such workers) to obtain the equivalent of a secondary school diploma and subsequently to gain improved employment, enter military service, or be placed in an institution of higher education." CAMP, by contrast, supports first-year undergraduates from migrant farmworker backgrounds who already hold an HSE credential or high school diploma.

Eligibility for HEP runs to "institutions of higher education as defined in HEA sections 101-102, or private nonprofit organizations" — and private nonprofits must partner with an IHE and use its facilities to operate the project. That last clause is why community colleges, regional comprehensives, and land-grant universities with agricultural-extension reach have dominated the awardee list for decades.

The FY2024 portfolio illustrates the pattern. The Department's HEP page lists 14 active grantees including Boise State University, Central Oregon Community College, Idaho State University, Michigan State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, with the rest of the portfolio anchored in agricultural-labor regions of California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and Puerto Rico. The institutions that win HEP are the institutions that can stand up GED/HiSET prep, bilingual counseling, transportation supports, and placement services within reach of labor camps and seasonal-housing clusters — not the institutions that simply have a strong proposal-writing shop.

Five outcomes that drive HEP scoring

The Department of Education's HEP guidance, including the 2018–2023 performance reports referenced from the program landing page, points review panels toward a small number of measurable outcomes that have driven scoring in past competitions:

• HSE attainment rate. What share of enrolled participants obtain a GED, HiSET, or state-approved high school equivalency credential within the project period.
• Placement rate. Of those who attain the HSE credential, how many are placed in postsecondary education, training, the military, or "improved employment" — the statute's exact language.
• Persistence and retention. Especially in HEP, where participants are often working agricultural shifts, persistence numbers are scrutinized closely.
• Recruitment depth. Whether the project draws meaningfully from the migrant and seasonal farmworker labor pool in its service area, rather than from broader adult-education waitlists.
• Partnership credibility. Letters and MOUs from migrant Head Start programs, WIOA Section 167 grantees, community health centers, and state migrant education programs (Title I-C) tend to differentiate strong applications from boilerplate ones.

On the budget side, HEP narratives consistently win or lose on two line items: counselor caseload ratios — the number of HEP participants assigned to each full-time counselor — and direct participant supports such as transportation vouchers, child care reimbursement, and HSE test fees. Reviewers want to see those costs justified by enrollment projections that are tied to documented farmworker population data, not to general adult-education demand in the service area.

Applicants who can credibly project upper-quartile performance on those metrics — and who can support that projection with three years of operating data, even from a non-HEP adult-education program — give themselves the strongest shot in a four-award field.

Three moves before the June 12 deadline

For grants offices choosing whether to commit a writer to HEP between now and June 12, the calculus is fairly clear. Institutions with existing HEP awards expiring at the end of FY2026, or with shovel-ready labor-camp partnerships and Title I-C state migrant office relationships, should treat this notice as a deadline to hit, not a decision to weigh. Institutions without those building blocks may be better served by tracking the next CAMP competition or by aligning with a partner IHE for a future cycle.

Either way, the next 25 days should include three concrete moves: confirm Grants.gov registration is current and SAM.gov status is "Active" for the applying entity; pull farmworker labor-market data from the most recent National Agricultural Workers Survey and your state's monitor-advocate office; and lock in partnership letters early, because the agricultural-extension and migrant-program partners HEP reviewers want to see are slow to turn around signed MOUs in late spring.

Community colleges and workforce-development nonprofits weighing this competition can search active federal grants on Granted to see related CAMP, WIOA Section 167, and Adult Education and Family Literacy Act solicitations that frequently stack with HEP funding — and to confirm whether a stronger fit is open in their region before committing scarce proposal-writing capacity to the June 12 deadline. For broader analysis of federal grant cycles, deadline strategy, and program-specific scoring guidance, the Granted news and analysis blog tracks similar Federal Register postings as they drop.