The lower price must be a current public cost, available to the same student, for an equivalent approved Virginia online course serving the same requirement with the same essential duration, delivery method, certificate path, and reporting value when reporting applies.
The comparison uses the student's all-in mandatory cost before course completion, including state fees, assessment fees, mandatory certificate fees, mandatory processing, mandatory reporting, and any other required charge.
Private coupon codes, expired promotions, affiliate or private-link prices, typo prices, wholesale rates, group rates, bundles, conditional discounts, nonpublic links, offers made to manipulate the guarantee, hidden-fee offers, and nonequivalent course formats are not included.
Qualified requests are reviewed manually and can be honored when the public checkout for this state opens.
National Course Portal may ask for provider URLs, screenshots, checkout-page proof, timestamps, fee details, or other reasonable verification and may deny requests that cannot be verified, change before review, are unavailable to ordinary public students, or do not represent a good-faith equivalent public offer.