A family with one child in Catholic school has an expense. A family with four has a decade-long capital project that competes directly with retirement, and usually nobody has laid it out on one page. Here is how the pieces work.
Start with the actual number, not the annual one
The instinct is to look at this year’s tuition. The planning number is the whole run: each child, each year, through graduation, at a tuition that rises most years, with the fees that arrive alongside it — registration, technology, uniforms, trips that are not really optional.
When families see that total for the first time it lands hard, and it should. But it also makes the problem solvable, because it has a shape. Tuition is a bulge with a defined end, not a permanent change to your cost of living. Plans that work usually fund the bulge deliberately rather than absorbing it out of cash flow and quietly stopping everything else for twelve years.
What a 529 does for K-12
529 plans are known as college accounts, and they also cover K-12 tuition, tax-free at the federal level. Beginning in 2026 the limit is $20,000 per student per year — double the $10,000 that applied before.
For a family with three or four children in Catholic school, that change is not incremental. At the old limit, a household could move $10,000 per child through a 529 in a year; now it is $20,000, which for most families covers the whole tuition bill rather than part of it.
Two points still matter more than the limit itself.
In Texas, the benefit is federal only. There is no state income tax deduction for contributing, because there is no state income tax. What you get is growth that is not taxed along the way and withdrawals that are tax-free for qualified expenses. That is real, and it is the entire case.
The benefit is growth, so time is the whole game. Money contributed in August and spent on September’s tuition has not grown, so the account did almost nothing except add a step. For a child born this year with thirteen years of school ahead, the case is strong. For a family whose eldest starts high school next fall, a 529 may be paperwork rather than planning — and a plain taxable account, or simply paying from cash flow, can be the better answer. An advisor who recommends a 529 without asking about the timeline is not doing the arithmetic.
Also worth knowing: a 529 has one beneficiary at a time, and the beneficiary can be changed to another qualifying family member. Families with several children typically run separate accounts and move leftover balances along as each child finishes.
Tuition against retirement
This is the real trade-off, and it deserves to be stated rather than smoothed over.
Tuition and retirement compete for the same dollars during exactly the years when earnings are highest and retirement saving compounds longest. Both matter. Only one of them can be borrowed for, and it is not retirement.
That does not mean retirement automatically wins. It means the sequence should be decided on purpose, with the numbers in front of you, rather than by default — and “by default” almost always means tuition wins, because the invoice has a due date and retirement does not.
The version that tends to hold up: fund enough retirement that you will not be dependent on your children later, capture any employer match before anything else, and then apply what remains to tuition with a plan for the years when two or three children overlap. The overlap years are the pinch, and they are visible from a decade away if anyone bothers to look.
What we do not touch
Giving.
Families who tithe do not treat it as a variable, and an advisor who proposes trimming it to fund tuition has misunderstood the household. The work is finding the room elsewhere — timing, tax, sequencing, sometimes an honest conversation about the house or the cars — not reducing what you have committed to God.
Often there is more room in the tax line than people expect. Bunching deductions, timing a gift of appreciated stock, getting the withholding right, structuring a business owner’s compensation properly. That is the same money, kept rather than found.
Ask the school, too
Multi-child discounts, parishioner rates, and need-based assistance are common and vary a great deal between schools and dioceses. Terms are rarely advertised well. Ask the school directly, ask before the cycle closes rather than when the bill arrives, and ask what the assistance looks like in year three rather than only in year one.
Getting it on one page
Most of the value here is not a product. It is the projection: every child, every year, tuition and college and retirement on the same timeline, with the pinch years marked and the tax consequences attached. That is planning work, and it is one of the most common reasons Catholic families call us.
This article is educational and not tax, legal, or investment advice. Education-funding and tax rules change and depend on your circumstances and your state; confirm the current rules with your tax adviser before acting. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal.