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2025 · Regular session · House bill
HB2851
HB2851 requires services that consolidate applications to medical or dental schools to include applications to Texas nursing schools, beginning with admission for fall 2027.
Official caption: Relating to including nursing school applications in a consolidated application service.
Official report lists House author(s): Howard, Perez, Vincent. This does not identify sponsors or amendment drafters.
Bill explanation published · Version and amendment review scope is stated below · Individual amendment records may not be separately annotated.
Bill highlights
Selected points from the published explanation. Follow each point to its source-linked context; conditions and limits may matter.
- HB2851 requires services that consolidate applications to medical or dental schools to include applications to Texas nursing schools, beginning with admission for fall 2027.
- The Texas Health Education Service must establish an advisory board made up of nursing-program representatives and people with nursing-application expertise.
- The act took effect September 1, 2025, but the application requirement starts with the fall 2027 entering class.
What does it do?
HB2851 requires services that consolidate applications to medical or dental schools to include applications to Texas nursing schools, beginning with admission for fall 2027. The requirement expressly includes the Texas Health Education Service at the University of Texas System Administration. It concerns the application process—not a guarantee of admission, new nursing-school seats, waived academic requirements or a free application. Final law, Sections 1–4.
The Texas Health Education Service must establish an advisory board made up of nursing-program representatives and people with nursing-application expertise. Members were to be appointed by November 1, 2025. The board must recommend how to include nursing applications and develop an implementation plan, which the service was required to publish online by January 1, 2026. The board and its temporary planning provisions expire September 1, 2027; the continuing application requirement does not expire with the board.
The act took effect September 1, 2025, but the application requirement starts with the fall 2027 entering class. These are statutory deadlines, not a finding that the required appointments or plan were completed. Official history.
What changed along the way?
The filed bill and initial House committee text would have begun with fall 2026 applications and did not contain the advisory-board process. Howard’s adopted House amendment added the board, plan, appointment/publication deadlines and sunset, and delayed the application requirement to fall 2027. The House-passed version incorporated those changes.
The Senate committee substitute placed the appointment, board and publication duties directly with the Texas Health Education Service, rather than the UT System governing board, and updated the service named in the application requirement. This was a committee-substitute change, not another indexed floor amendment. The House concurred May 28, and the governor signed June 20, 2025. The final law retains the fall 2027 start.
For the full amendment record, open the official amendment index.
Official bill versions
Compare the published text versions in the official text index. A change is not attributed to a specific amendment here without a verified record.
Who could benefit—and who could bear the costs?
Applicants could benefit from a more consolidated route to applying to participating nursing programs; schools and the application service would bear implementation and operating work. The act does not set an individual application fee or establish a fixed pilot-school count.
The latest fiscal note estimates a $3,728,217 negative impact to general-revenue-related funds in fiscal 2026–27, including projected staffing, technology and implementation expenses. It assumes ten additional full-time positions, about $1.94 million in biennial salaries and benefits, and a one-time $150,000 planning-consultant cost. The model also shows $229,120 in application-fee revenue and corresponding institutional spending in 2027. Its assumptions—roughly six pilot schools and 2,400 applications in 2027, growing to 50 schools by 2030—are forecasts, not statutory limits or guaranteed results. The projected move toward fee-supported operations is also an expectation, not assured savings.
The bill itself makes no appropriation. No local-government fiscal effect was anticipated. The introduced-version fiscal note had anticipated no significant state fiscal effect because costs would be borne by institutional funds; that earlier assessment is not the final estimate.
Official sources
- Bill history and latest recorded action
- Bill versions, analyses and fiscal notes
- Action history and votes
- Amendment index
Catalog report retrieved 2026-10-25. Check the official record for corrections or later changes.
