Truancy Laws by State: Notice Requirements, Thresholds and Statutory Citations
Every truancy template on the internet was written for one state and is being used in fifty. This hub exists to make the differences visible — and to be explicit about which rows we have verified and which we have not, because a confidently wrong statutory citation is worse than no citation at all.
| Axis | The variants | Why it changes your process | Verified example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit of counting | Full days, part-days, class periods, or hours | An hours-based state cannot use a days-based template at all | CA counts a 30-minute absence or tardy as a truancy event |
| Counting window | School year, semester, calendar month, rolling six months, consecutive days | The same student is truant in one state and not the next on identical attendance | WI counts per semester; TX uses a six-month window |
| Tardiness included | Counts toward truancy, converts to absence, or excluded | Districts that count only full days under-report where tardies count | CA EC §48260 includes tardies over 30 minutes |
| Notice required in statute | Required, permitted, or silent | Where silent, district policy governs and you have latitude | CA and WI both require notice |
| Notice contents enumerated | Enumerated in statute, or left to the district | Enumerated states leave almost no drafting latitude | CA EC §48260.5; WI §118.16 |
| Delivery method specified | Registered/certified, personal service, first-class, or unspecified | Determines postage budget and proof-of-service practice | WI §118.16 specifies methods |
| Referral pathway | Civil juvenile, parent criminal, review board, county diversion | Determines who the respondent is and what must precede filing | CA SARB §48263; TX civil since HB 2398 (2015) |
Verified as at 4 August 2026 for California, Texas and Wisconsin only. Everything else on this page is written as structure rather than as a threshold, deliberately.
Our editorial policy, stated plainly
There are two ways to build a fifty-state truancy table. One is to fill in all fifty rows from secondary sources and publish it. The other is to publish the rows you have verified against primary sources, mark the rest as unverified, and fill them in over time.
The first approach produces a better-looking page and a worse one. Undated fifty-state summaries are already the dominant artefact in this search result — law-firm marketing pages, consumer legal sites, and comparison PDFs from organisations that produced them once in 2015 and never revisited them. Several of them are wrong in ways that would cause a district to send the wrong notice.
So: we publish verified rows only, with a date. A row that says UNVERIFIED is more useful to a district technology director than a row that says "5 days" and is wrong, because the first one sends you to your state education agency and the second one sends you to a defective referral.
- Verified, published: California, Texas, Wisconsin. Each has its own page below, with the statutory sections named.
- In progress: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington. We have drafts for these and are verifying thresholds and citations against current statute before they go up.
- Not yet started: the remaining thirty states.
If you find an error in a verified row, tell us. Corrections get a dated note on the page rather than a silent edit.
What to establish about your own state, in six questions
Whatever your state, these six answers determine every attendance document you send. Get them in writing from your state education agency or your counsel, and put the answers in your attendance procedure rather than in an individual's head.
- 1. What is the unit, and what is the window? Days, part-days, periods or hours; and over a year, semester, month or rolling period. Everything else depends on this.
- 2. Does a tardy count, and from how many minutes? Then check that your SIS is applying that number and not a local convention.
- 3. Is written notice required, and at which thresholds? There are usually at least two — first classification, and habitual.
- 4. Does the statute enumerate what the notice must say? If yes, you have almost no drafting latitude and your template must be rebuilt against the statutory list. If no, build to the union on the truancy letter page.
- 5. Is a delivery method specified? And what record must you keep of the method used?
- 6. What must have happened before a referral is accepted? A conference offered, an intervention documented, a specific plan written. This is the precondition most referrals fail on.
One extra worth asking your SIS administrator rather than your counsel: does your student information system compute the truancy count using the state definition, or a local one someone configured years ago? In our experience of district data, the answer is more often the second than anyone expects.
What is constant across every state we have looked at
Three things do not vary, and they are worth building your process around because they are stable when thresholds are not.
Only unexcused absences count. Truancy is defined on unexcused absence everywhere. Whatever your state's number, a letter that counts documented illness toward it is defective. That single rule eliminates a large share of the defective notices we have seen.
Notice in the family's language is not a truancy question. It is a civil rights obligation that sits above the attendance statute, and it applies whether or not the truancy statute mentions language. A notice sent in English to a household with a Spanish language of record is a problem regardless of what the Education Code says.
Proof of service decides referrals. No state's statute is satisfied by a letter you cannot show was sent, to whom, at what address, on what date. This is why the records layer matters more than the drafting layer, and it is why we built ours the way we did — every send in Kastr writes into a per-district append-only audit log whose entries are SHA-256 hash-chained, with UPDATE and DELETE revoked at the database role, so the notice history is tamper-evident rather than merely stored.
Not legal advice, and we mean it. Kastr sells communication software. We are not qualified to tell you what your state requires and we have not tried to. Everything on this page is either a verified primary-source citation or an explicit statement that we do not know. Take the six questions above to the person in your district who owns attendance compliance.
Questions people actually ask
How many unexcused absences is considered truancy?
There is no national answer and the range is wide — some states classify a student as truant after three unexcused absences in a school year, others count days per semester, and some count in hours rather than days. The counting window matters as much as the number. Confirm your own state's definition with your state education agency rather than relying on a template written elsewhere.
Which states require a truancy notice to be sent by certified mail?
Some states specify registered or certified mail or personal service for the habitual truancy notice; Wisconsin's §118.16 is the clearest example we have verified. Many states specify nothing, leaving the method to district policy. Where the statute is silent, first-class plus a documented second channel, with certified reserved for the final notice before referral, is a defensible practice.
Does every state require a written truancy notice?
No. Some statutes require notice at specified thresholds, some permit it, and some are silent and leave it to district policy. Where the statute is silent you have latitude on both contents and method — but you still need proof of what was sent, because that is what a referral is tested on.
At what age does compulsory attendance end?
It varies by state, commonly somewhere between 16 and 18, and several states have moved the upper age in recent years. It matters operationally because a truancy process against a student above the compulsory age may not be available, and because the addressee of the notice changes once a student reaches majority. Confirm the current age range for your state; do not rely on a figure from an undated summary.
Do tardies count toward truancy?
In some states yes. California counts an unexcused tardy or absence of more than 30 minutes as a truancy event on the same footing as a full unexcused day. Other states convert accumulated tardies to absences, and some exclude tardiness from the truancy definition entirely. Check both the statute and what your SIS is actually applying.
Are parents or students prosecuted for truancy?
Both models exist, sometimes in the same state. Texas moved student truancy to a civil juvenile process in 2015 while retaining a parental offence for contributing to nonattendance. California routes cases through a School Attendance Review Board before any prosecution route. Establish which model applies before you decide who the respondent on a referral is.
One price. Every feature. Locked for three years.
$3.50 per student per year under 5,000 students. No tiers, no add-on modules, no per-message fees. Published on the site because you should not have to book a call to learn a price.