PMHNP and Nurse Practitioner Scholarships for 2026-27

PMHNP scholarships and nurse practitioner scholarships come in two very different sizes. The federal ones, the NHSC Scholarship, the Nurse Corps Scholarship and the VA Health Professional Scholarship, pay your tuition plus a monthly stipend, and in return you work where they place you after you graduate. Most of the rest pay a fixed amount, usually $2,500 to $10,000. The largest psychiatric-specific award you can apply to directly is the ANA Minority Fellowship: up to $15,000 a year for master’s students and $22,000 for doctoral students. We checked 17 programs on the awarding bodies’ own sites on October 8, 2026, and 4 of them are taking applications right now.

Nurse Practitioner Scholarships Open Right Now

As of October 8, 2026, these 4 are accepting applications. The first deadline is close, so start with it.

• Deborah E. Trautman Future Nurse Leader Scholarship: $5,000 ($3,500 for educational expenses, up to $1,500 for conference travel). It closes October 30 and is open to master’s and doctoral students at AACN member schools on NursingCAS. You also need to join AACN’s Graduate Nursing Student Academy, which is free.
• Scrubin Uniforms/AACN Scholarship: $2,500, awarded three times a year. This cycle closes December 1, and it’s limited to schools with an affiliation agreement with Scrubin Uniforms, so check your school is on the list first.
• NEF Graduate Nursing Scholarships: the application opened October 1, 2026 and stays open until February 1, 2027. NEF doesn’t publish award amounts, and it asks for a 3.6 GPA.
• Madeline A. Naegle Scholarship for Mental Health Nursing: awarded through the same NEF application, with a preference for graduate nurses specializing in mental health nursing. If you’re applying to NEF as a PMHNP student, this is the one your application should be written toward.

Every PMHNP Scholarship We Verified, With Amounts and Deadlines

The table below has all 17 programs. 4 more open later in the 2026-27 cycle, and 9 have closed for this year but run every year, so they’re worth putting on your calendar now. Where an awarding body doesn’t publish an amount, the table says so rather than guessing.

Scholarships Just for Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner Students

4 of the 17 programs are specific to psychiatric-mental health nursing. They’re smaller in number than the general nursing scholarships, but your odds are better because the applicant pool is narrower.

The ANA Minority Fellowship Program is the biggest. It’s funded by SAMHSA and pays a stipend of up to $15,000 a year for master’s students and $22,000 for doctoral students. Fellows commit to two years of service in mental health or substance misuse prevention and treatment. The doctoral program says plainly that it doesn’t fund post-master’s certificates, so it isn’t an option for an FNP adding a psych certificate. Final submissions for the Fall 2026 cohort were due June 15, 2026, so watch the portal for the next call.

The Madeline A. Naegle Scholarship through NEF gives preference to graduate nurses specializing in mental health. It’s open now, through February 1, 2027.

School-run federal traineeships are the third source, and the one most students never hear about. Some nursing schools hold federal Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training (BHWET) grants from HRSA and use them to fund scholarships for their own psychiatric students. The University of Arizona’s BHWET program, for example, offers selected PMHNP DNP students a traineeship and a $32,500 scholarship. You can’t apply to these from outside the school, so ask any program you’re considering whether it holds a BHWET or similar workforce grant.

Federal Scholarships That Cover Full Tuition

Three federal programs pay tuition rather than a fixed sum, and all three ask for service in return. That trade is the whole decision. If you already want to work in community mental health, a VA clinic or a shortage area, they’re the best money available. If you don’t, the service commitment is a real cost.

• NHSC Scholarship: tuition and eligible fees, a yearly payment for other costs, and a monthly stipend, for up to four years. Psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner is on HRSA’s list of eligible disciplines. You owe two to four years of full-time service at an NHSC-approved site in a shortage area. The 2026 application has closed.
• Nurse Corps Scholarship: tuition, fees and other educational costs plus a monthly stipend, all of it taxable. You work at a facility with a critical shortage of nurses after graduating. The 2026 application has closed, with decisions by September 30, 2026.
• VA Health Professional Scholarship Program: full tuition, a monthly stipend and a yearly book stipend for master’s or doctoral students on a nurse practitioner track, with a job at VA after you graduate. VA projects the next cycle will open in January 2027.

Loan Repayment If You Miss the Scholarship Window

If you’re already enrolled, or a scholarship didn’t come through, loan repayment does much the same job after you graduate. The NHSC Students to Service program is the one to know about while you’re still in school, because you apply in your final year.

Our nurse practitioner loan forgiveness guide walks through which of these fits which kind of job, and how the tax treatment changes what each one is worth.

How to Fit Scholarships Around PMHNP School Costs

Most of these awards are $2,500 to $10,000, which matters against tuition but won’t cover it. Our breakdown of what PMHNP school costs shows where the money goes, and the most affordable PMHNP programs are often a bigger saving than any single scholarship. The practical order is to pick an affordable program, apply for every general award you qualify for, and write your strongest application for the psychiatric-specific ones.

Three things improve your odds across the list. Join AACN’s Graduate Nursing Student Academy, because it’s free and three of the AACN awards on this list require it. Keep one essay about why you’re going into psychiatric care and adapt it, rather than starting each application from scratch. And put the reopening dates in your calendar now: VA Health Professional Scholarship Program, Uniform Advantage/GNSA Scholarship, NurseThink/AACN Scholarship, Certiphi/GNSA Scholarship all open later this cycle.

How We Built This List

Every program here was checked on the awarding body’s own website on October 8, 2026. We saved the text of each page and confirmed that every amount, deadline and eligibility rule in the table appears there word for word. Aggregator sites were used only to find program names. Two HRSA pages refuse automated requests, so we read them in a browser and saved the text the same way.

We left some programs out on purpose. California’s Advanced Practice Healthcare Scholarship isn’t taking applications for 2026-27, and its behavioral health scholarship has no upcoming cycle. An AACN graduate collaboration grant shows only a 2024 round. We couldn’t confirm on their own pages that the Army Health Professions Scholarship Program or the Indian Health Service scholarship cover psychiatric nurse practitioner students, so they aren’t listed. Research grants for working investigators and conference-travel awards are left out because they don’t pay toward school.