Free AI for Teachers: Two Real Offers, and the Date Most Guides Get Wrong

Yes, and there are two of them. If you work at an accredited US K–12 school or district, ChatGPT for Teachers is free through June 2028, and Claude for Teachers is free for a year if you sign up by June 30, 2027. Neither one asks for a card. Neither one is ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro — they are separate products with school privacy terms attached. You can hold both at once, and you verify for each one through a different company, so being approved for one tells you nothing about the other. Two things worth knowing before you start: the eligibility is wider than the word “teacher” suggests, and the June 2027 expiry date still printed on page one of Google is out of date.

Two offers, one person, two different clocks

The interesting thing about these two is not that they are free. It is that the free periods are built differently, and that decides which one you should set up first.

OpenAI runs a calendar. ChatGPT for Teachers is free for everyone until June 2028, whenever you join. Sign up in May 2028 and you get a few weeks. Anthropic runs a stopwatch. Claude for Teachers gives you a full year from the day you are verified — but the door closes on June 30, 2027, and you have to be through it by then.

So if you only do one thing this term, do the Claude sign-up, because that is the one with a deadline you can miss. The OpenAI one will still be there.

The expiry date on page one of Google is a year out of date

ChatGPT for Teachers launched on November 19, 2025, and the promise that week was free through June 2027. Every story written at the time printed that. Since then OpenAI extended it, and now says June 2028 on its announcement page and again in the FAQ of its help-centre article: “ChatGPT for Teachers is free through June 2028 for verified U.S. K–12 educators.”

The coverage did not follow. Search the question today and you still land on pages headlined with 2027, and on a November 2025 news story describing the benefit as free ChatGPT Pro, which it has never been. Pro is a $200-a-month consumer plan. This is a separate education workspace.

A year is not a rounding error when you are deciding whether something is worth an afternoon of setup. It is the difference between “this expires at the end of next school year” and “this covers the next two.” When an offer has a date attached, read it on the provider page. We keep the whole set of them, with the date we last read each one, on the AI perks and deals page.

OpenAI does add a caution worth repeating: after June 2028 it “may introduce or adjust pricing,” with the stated goal of keeping the plan affordable, and it promises advance notice. Free now is not free forever.

“Teacher” is narrower than the eligibility

This is where most people disqualify themselves by accident. Neither offer is limited to classroom teachers.

OpenAI states you are eligible if you are currently employed by an accredited K–12 school or district in the United States and you are a teacher, staff member, administrator, or district leader. Front-office staff qualify. A district IT director qualifies. Anthropic frames it the same way, covering teachers, instructional coaches, aides, librarians, specialists, counsellors and administrators, and requires you to be 18 or over.

What neither covers is students. OpenAI says so plainly — the plan “is not for students” — and Anthropic describes Claude for Teachers as an educators-only product. If you are a student, skip to the section below; the offers that apply to you are different ones and they have different catches.

How to claim both, in the order that wastes least time

1. Find your school email. Both verifications start with the address your district issued you. A personal Gmail will not get you through either one.
2. Do Claude first, because it has the deadline. Start at claude.com/solutions/teachers and choose the individual educator route. Verification runs through Goodstack, and you may be asked to upload something showing you work there — a school ID, a contract, a pay stub or a teaching certificate.
3. Then do ChatGPT. Go to chatgpt.com/k12-verification and verify with the same school email. This one runs through SheerID.
4. Choose a workspace, do not create a duplicate. After OpenAI verifies you, it will offer to either create a new workspace for your school or district, or join one that already exists on your email domain. Look for the existing one first. Workspaces cannot mix educators from different districts, so a second one for the same school just splits your colleagues in half.
5. Tell your district IT contact. Both companies have a free district-level version — OpenAI with domain claiming, SSO and role controls, Anthropic with a free Claude Enterprise organisation covering all staff. If someone is going to set that up, it is better done once than forty times.

Expect a wait rather than an instant approval. Verification is a human-plus-software process on both sides, and each company re-checks eligibility on its own schedule.

What you are actually getting, and what you are not

Both are real products rather than trial tiers, and both are built around the same promise: your conversations are not used to train the models by default, and the terms are written for schools. OpenAI points to FERPA compliance and admin controls. Anthropic ships FERPA-aligned educator terms, a K–12 data processing addendum, and says training is off by default on verified educator accounts.

The feature sets differ in character. OpenAI gives you a familiar ChatGPT workspace — its GPT‑5.1 models, file uploads, web search and deep research, voice, image generation, memory, custom GPTs, and collaboration with colleagues in your district. Anthropic leans pedagogical: teaching skills grounded in learning science, a connector to Learning Commons that maps to academic standards in all 50 states, curricular material from OpenSciEd and Illustrative Mathematics, and connectors to classroom tools including Canva Education, MagicSchool, Diffit and Brisk Teaching. It also includes Claude Code and Cowork, so a task can be handed off once and repeat on a schedule.

One caution that applies to Claude for Teachers specifically: Anthropic revised its own announcement on August 28, 2026 to make clear that using identifiable student information requires authorisation from your school or district. The examples now describe de-identified classroom data. Whether and how educational data may be used is set by your district and state policy, not by you.

If you are not a K–12 educator

There are three more education offers running in the US right now, and they do not work like the teacher ones. All three take a payment method.

US college students can get Google AI Pro free for 12 months, worth $19.99 a month, redeemable until December 31, 2026. Google requires a valid form of payment at sign-up and charges $19.99 a month automatically when the year ends. Two conditions Google states and almost nobody repeats: eligibility has to be re-verified every year, and students whose 2025 trial already expired can qualify again. Note also that this is the US offer — Google excludes Canada from both this and the non-US version, along with Bolivia, Albania, Macau, Hong Kong and Tunisia.

Students who write code can claim $100 in OpenAI Codex credits, shown as 2,500 credits, at a degree-granting university in the US or Canada. The credits expire 12 months after they are granted. It is not ChatGPT Plus, and it stacks with the Google year.

Students in Ohio get a wider door than the national one. Announced on August 17, 2026 alongside OpenAI’s Pike County data-centre agreement, up to $84 million in Codex credits are available to roughly 844,000 eligible Ohio college, community college and technical school students aged 18 and over during the 2026–27 academic year, at $100 each. The national offer requires a degree-granting university. If you are at an Ohio community college or a trade school, that one turns you away and this one does not.

And university faculty should look at Perplexity Education Pro, which counts educators and not only students — though as of a help-page rewrite on September 3, 2026, Perplexity no longer publishes the price on its own site, so check the figure on the upgrade screen before you verify.

What it is worth, stated carefully

It is tempting to multiply a consumer price by twelve and call that your saving. Resist it, because neither teacher product is the consumer product. What is fair to say is this: the nearest paid things a member of the public can buy are ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month and Claude Pro at roughly the same, and a teacher who would otherwise have paid for one of them stops needing to. Over the roughly twenty-one months between now and June 2028, that is real money on a teacher salary.

The more interesting value is the part you cannot buy at retail at all. A consumer subscription does not come with FERPA-aligned terms, a district workspace, admin controls, or a curriculum connector mapped to your state standards. Those exist in the education versions and nowhere on the consumer price list, which is the actual reason to use the school account rather than a personal one you already pay for.

What we could not confirm

Three limits on the above, stated because a page that only reports wins is not much use.

• We did not run either verification. We are not US K–12 staff, so we read the eligibility rules and the sign-up flows rather than passing through them. Approval times and document requests come from the providers’ own guidance, not from our own attempt.
• The Ohio claim page did not render for us. The page at chatgpt.com exists and is titled for Ohio college students, but its contents load through scripts we could not read. The numbers we quote — $84 million, 844,000 students, $100 each, 2026–27 — come from OpenAI’s own written announcement instead.
• The Perplexity price is no longer first-party. Perplexity rewrote its Education Pro help article on September 3, 2026 and removed the figure. We have not seen a different number on a Perplexity page, so we carry $10 with a flag on it rather than deleting or asserting it.

Questions teachers actually ask about these two offers

Is ChatGPT free for teachers?

Yes. ChatGPT for Teachers is free for verified US K–12 educators through June 2028, per OpenAI’s own announcement page and help centre. Pages still saying June 2027 are repeating the November 2025 launch promise, which OpenAI has since extended.

Is this the same as free ChatGPT Plus or ChatGPT Pro?

No, and a widely shared 2025 headline saying otherwise is wrong. ChatGPT for Teachers is a separate education workspace with school privacy terms, admin controls and district collaboration. Plus and Pro are consumer plans you pay for.

Do I need a credit card to claim free AI for teachers?

Not for either teacher offer. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic asks for a payment method to verify an educator. That is the clearest difference between these and the student offers, which all require a card and auto-renew at full price.

Can I get both Claude for Teachers and ChatGPT for Teachers?

Yes. They are unrelated programmes from competing companies, with separate verification. Nothing in either set of terms prevents holding both, and each uses a different verifier, so approval by one is no guarantee for the other.

Who counts as an educator for these offers?

Wider than you might think. OpenAI includes any teacher, staff member, administrator or district leader employed by an accredited US K–12 school or district. Anthropic lists teachers, instructional coaches, aides, librarians, specialists, counsellors and administrators, and requires you to be 18 or over.

Can students use ChatGPT for Teachers or Claude for Teachers?

No. OpenAI states the plan is not for students and says student-facing features may come later. Claude for Teachers is educators only. Students have their own separate offers, including a free year of Google AI Pro and $100 in OpenAI Codex credits.

Is student data safe in these education AI products?

Both are built for it, and both put limits on you rather than only on themselves. Conversations are not used for training by default in either product. Anthropic revised its announcement in August 2026 to state that using identifiable student information requires school or district authorisation, and that district and state policy governs educational data. Check with your district before uploading anything with a name on it.

What happens when the free period ends?

OpenAI says it may introduce or adjust pricing after June 2028, aiming to keep the plan affordable, and will give advance notice. Anthropic grants a full year to anyone signed up by June 30, 2027 and notes that prices and plans may change at its discretion. Neither will silently charge a card, because neither has one.

Where to check next

If you want the whole set rather than the education slice, our AI perks and deals page tracks 13 live US offers with the date each was last read, and keeps the expired ones on the page marked expired — which is the trap most roundups leave open. For list prices rather than discounts, see the AI price tracker. For the wider question of who is giving AI away right now, see who is giving away AI subscriptions. And if AI is new to you, start with how to use ChatGPT, step by step.

About the author. Prof. H writes profhlab.com for people who would like a straight answer and a date attached to it. Every offer above was read on the provider’s own page on September 14, 2026: OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Teachers announcement and help-centre article, Anthropic’s Claude for Teachers announcement and its K–12 teachers page, OpenAI’s PORTS-Pike announcement and Codex student terms, Google’s student offer post, and Perplexity’s help centre. We take no commission from any company named here. Found something out of date? Tell us — we correct in public.