Does This Mean I Would Only Get 75% of My BAH Until My 4th Class Starts?
Q: This is a situational question. My school considers 12 credit hours per semester full time. Currently, I am enrolled in the fall term for 12 credit hours, but my 4th class doesn’t start until mid-October. Does that mean I will only receive BAH at the 75% pursuit rate until the 4th class starts, or will I receive 100% BAH for the entire semester?
A: You won’t get any BAH for any part of the semester. Because the Post 9/11 GI Bill does not pay BAH – it pays a Monthly Housing Allowance (MHA). To call it BAH is very misleading as the two are very, very different.
Now that my ranting on BAH is out of the way, let’s move on to what you would actually receive. Because the MHA is a day-by-day, credit-by-credit based calculation, you only get paid for the number of days enrolled in school multiplied by your rate of pursuit.
So in your situation, you would get a partial MHA up to when your other class starts in mid-October. If you are carrying 9 credits up to that point, then you would get 75% of the full MHA authorized for the zip code of your school. In your case, your school considers 12 credits as full-time. If you are taking 9 credits until mid-October, then you would get 9/12ths of the full MHA up to that point.
Assuming your other three classes run to the end of the semester, your MHA would increase to the full authorized amount starting in mid-October when your other class starts and you attain full-time status.
All of this of course is assuming you are at the 100% Post 9/11 GI Bill tier level. If not, then you have to multiply everything by your tier percentage to see what you would actually get.
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