For Louisiana Teachers · Standards Alignment
Louisiana’s Financial Literacy Requirements, Mapped to a Ready-to-Teach Course
Louisiana requires students to complete a financial literacy course to graduate. This page sets out what the law asks for, lists all 14 of the state’s grades 9–12 financial literacy topics, and shows for each one whether our 10 classroom-ready units cover it fully, in part, or not at all — with the partial rows naming exactly what is missing.
The Requirement
What Louisiana actually requires
Under La. R.S. 17:270, “Each student shall successfully complete a one-unit Financial Literacy course as a requirement for high school graduation.” That is a full unit, where most states that require personal finance ask for half of one. The statute began as Acts 2018 No. 154, amended by Acts 2019 No. 116, Acts 2023 No. 267 and Acts 2025 No. 48. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education set the timing through Bulletin 741, the Louisiana Handbook for School Administrators: the requirement applies to students entering high school in the 2024-2025 school year, the class of 2028.
⚠ Louisiana does not publish academic standards for this course, and that is not an oversight to work around — it is where the requirement lives. The content is set by the statute itself. R.S. 17:270(B)(2) lists 14 topics, lettered (a) to (n), that the course “shall include but need not be limited to”, and the Department’s Financial Literacy Course Description for course 160345, updated June 18, 2025, reprints exactly those 14. This page maps all of them.
Two consequences worth planning around. First, the list is a minimum: the same course description adds 18 suggested topics — predatory lending, credit reports, renters and homeowners insurance, cybersecurity, buying against renting and more — which are not required and are not crosswalked below. Second, a full unit is a great deal of course for 14 topics, so the room the statute leaves is real, and what goes in it is a local decision rather than a state one.
Check every detail against Louisiana’s own sources: La. R.S. 17:270 as published by the Legislature, the Financial Literacy Course Description and the Department’s implementation FAQ, and the graduation requirements. One scheduling note: Financial Literacy is required on the TOPS University pathway but does not count as one of its four mathematics credits, so confirm how your own building schedules it before you build a syllabus around it.
The Course
10 units, 50 days, written to be taught in order
10 five-day units, 50 class periods of core instruction. How much of a semester that is depends on your building: on an every-other-day block, where a semester is roughly 45 to 50 meetings, the units fill it; on a traditional daily period, where a semester runs nearer 90, they are the spine and the course tests and the gap material below fill the rest. Plan the schedule against your own calendar rather than against this figure.
Every unit ships a free pacing guide, pre-quiz and vocabulary sheet that need no account, so you can read the objectives this crosswalk is built from before deciding anything. The full teacher kit — teacher guide, student packet, quizzes, unit project, final assessment, editable slides and the complete ZIP — comes with Full Membership.
Each card shows how many Louisiana topics that unit carries, fully or in part. A standard taught by two units is counted on both, so these add to 17 rather than to the 10 standards the course addresses.
The Crosswalk
All 14 topics, and how far the course covers each one
10 of the 14 topics are addressed by a unit — 5 fully and 5 in part. Of the 4 that are not, 4 are served elsewhere on this site and are linked in the table. Standard codes and wording below are reproduced from Louisiana’s own La. R.S. 17:270(B)(2) — the fourteen topics the Financial Literacy course must include, as listed in the statute and reprinted in the Louisiana Department of Education's course description for Financial Literacy (160345), updated June 18, 2025.
How to read the third column. A unit is listed against a standard only where its published pacing-guide objectives support it, so every row here is one you can check yourself against a free PDF. Fully means those objectives support the standard’s main clause and every requirement it names outside its “e.g.” examples. Partly means they support the main clause but not one or more named requirements — and the row says which, so you know exactly what to supplement. It is a strict rule, applied the same way in all seven subjects; the member materials in each unit go further than the free guide advertises, so treat this as the floor, not the ceiling.
The misses are not spread evenly. Money management, credit and debt (2) is where the course leaves the most to supplement — 1 of its 2 topics are carried by no unit — so plan for that subject first. The table names every subject.
Two things to know before you read the table, and the first is unusual enough to change how you use this page. Louisiana has no numbered academic standards for this course. There is no standards document to hold beside the table. The content requirement is 14 lettered topics written into the statute itself — La. R.S. 17:270(B)(2)(a) to (n) — which the Department’s course description reprints. That makes each row unusually direct: a topic is either taught or it is not. It also makes the list a floor, not a syllabus, because the statute says the course “shall include but need not be limited to” them, and the Department adds 18 further topics it merely suggests. Those 18 are not crosswalked here, because mapping a suggestion as though it were a requirement would overstate what Louisiana asks for. Second, the subject grouping in the left-hand column is ours, not the state’s: Louisiana prints one undifferentiated list of 14, and we have grouped them into seven subjects so the table can be read. The lettering is untouched.
| Subject | Topics | Fully | Partly | Not by a unit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Banking and accounts | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2 Money management, credit and debt | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 3 Taxes | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 4 Saving, investing and interest | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 5 Insurance, inheritance and risk | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 6 Consumer rights and the law | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| 7 Paying for education | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| All seven subjects | 14 | 5 | 5 | 4 |
1 · Banking and accounts
| Topic | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| (a) Banking and accounts |
Types of bank accounts offered, opening and managing a bank account, and assessing the quality of a depository institution's services | PartlyBanking & Checking · Modern Payments, Scams & FraudNot covered here: Two parts of this topic are not reached. Opening an account — what a bank asks for and what a first account-holder needs to bring — is not taught. Nor is assessing the quality of a depository institution’s services, which asks students to compare one institution against another rather than to use the one they have. |
| (b) Banking and accounts |
Balancing a checkbook | FullyBanking & Checking |
2 · Money management, credit and debt
| Topic | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| (c) Money management, credit and debt |
Basic principles of money management, such as spending, credit, credit scores, and managing debt, including retail and credit card debt | PartlyBudgeting & First Paycheck · Credit & Borrowing · Saving & Emergency FundsNot covered here: Retail debt is named beside credit card debt and is a different animal — store cards, in-store financing, buy-now-pay-later at the till. No published objective covers it, and it is the form of credit a Louisiana sixteen-year-old is most likely to be offered first. |
| (d) Money management, credit and debt |
Completing a loan application | No unit — see Credit lessons & worksheets · Credit & Debt articles |
3 · Taxes
| Topic | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| (g) Taxes |
Computing federal income taxes | FullyTaxes & First Filing |
| (h) Taxes |
Local tax assessments | No unit — see Taxes articles · Housing articles |
4 · Saving, investing and interest
| Topic | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| (i) Saving, investing and interest |
Computing interest rates by various mechanisms | FullySaving & Emergency Funds · Credit & Borrowing |
| (l) Saving, investing and interest |
Types of savings and investments | PartlySaving & Emergency Funds · Investing & Long-Term Growth · Banking & CheckingNot covered here: The investment half of this topic is thinner than the savings half, and on purpose. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs are not compared, because the Investing unit teaches the money before it reaches the market and prints no rate of return so that it does not go out of date. For a one-unit Louisiana course that is a gap worth filling; the unit says where. |
5 · Insurance, inheritance and risk
| Topic | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| (e) Insurance, inheritance and risk |
Receiving an inheritance and related implications | No unit — see Estate Planning articles |
| (f) Insurance, inheritance and risk |
Basic principles of personal insurance policies | FullyInsurance & Risk |
6 · Consumer rights and the law
| Topic | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| (j) Consumer rights and the law |
Simple contracts | PartlyRenting & Major Purchases · Modern Payments, Scams & FraudNot covered here: The units read one kind of contract closely and never teach contracts as an instrument — what makes an agreement binding, what a signature commits you to, and what happens when one side does not perform. A Louisiana teacher should expect to add that framing around Renting Day 2. |
| (k) Consumer rights and the law |
Contesting an incorrect billing statement | PartlyModern Payments, Scams & FraudNot covered here: The procedure is missing, and deliberately so. The unit prints no dispute deadline, liability cap or statutory limit, precisely so that it does not go out of date, and points at the CFPB and the account’s own disclosure instead. So a student finishes knowing which card to have used and that a dispute is worth raising, without the letter, the timeline or the form. That is a short lesson to add and Louisiana names it as a topic of its own. |
| (m) Consumer rights and the law |
State and federal laws concerning finance | No unit — see Legal Basics articles · Scams & Fraud articles |
7 · Paying for education
| Topic | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| (n) Paying for education |
Scholarships, grants, and other financial opportunities to pay for postsecondary education | FullyCareers & Paying for Education |
The Gaps
The 4 standards these units do not teach
No single course covers 14 standards to the same depth, and a crosswalk that claimed otherwise would not be much use to you in a curriculum review. These are the ones the 10 units do not carry, each with the reason. Most are served by something else on this site; where nothing is, it says so. Links marked lessons, worksheets or by a printable’s name are classroom material; links marked articles are background reading rather than something you can hand to a class.
- (d) Completing a loan applicationCompleting a loan application. The Credit unit teaches what borrowing costs and how to read a statement, and the Careers unit prices student loans, but no published objective walks a student through filling out an application — what it asks for, what a lender does with it, or what a co-signer is agreeing to. Elsewhere on this site: Credit lessons & worksheets, Credit & Debt articles.
- (h) Local tax assessmentsLocal tax assessments — how a property is assessed, what a millage does, and why two houses on one street can pay different amounts. The Taxes unit is built around a first filer’s income tax and prints no property-tax content, and Renting Day 4 totals a tenant’s monthly costs without reaching the assessment behind them. Elsewhere on this site: Taxes articles, Housing articles.
- (e) Receiving an inheritance and related implicationsReceiving an inheritance and the implications that come with it. Nothing in these ten units touches inheritance, estates or what a beneficiary has to do. This is one of the topics that makes Louisiana’s list distinctive — most states do not ask for it in a high-school personal finance course. Elsewhere on this site: Estate Planning articles.
- (m) State and federal laws concerning financeState and federal laws concerning finance. The Payments unit deliberately prints no liability cap, dispute deadline or statutory limit — that is what keeps it from going out of date — and delegates to the CFPB and the account’s own disclosure. So consumer-protection law, and Louisiana’s own financial statutes, are named by the requirement and taught by no published objective. Elsewhere on this site: Legal Basics articles, Scams & Fraud articles.
For Your Documentation
Using this in a curriculum map
Copy the standard codes straight from the table into your planning documents. Each unit’s own page lists its five daily objectives, and the free pacing guide prints them in a one-page table you can attach to a curriculum map or hand to a department head.
If you also report against the national frameworks, the Jump$tart and CEE crosswalk maps the same library to those. For placement and end-of-course evidence, the assessments hub lists the free course diagnostic and the unit and course tests.
Teach the whole course
The pacing guides, pre-quizzes and vocabulary sheets are free and need no account. Full Membership adds every teacher guide, student packet, quiz, unit project, final assessment and editable slide deck across all 10 units, plus the worksheet generators and printables the units point to.
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