This policy brief outlines how national education accounts (NEAs) are created, and why they are a vast improvement over current financial tracking systems in the education sector. Examples from the health sector illustrate the benefits of national accounts for improving public services, and their ubiquity highlights the poor state of affairs of education sector data. Drawing upon several NEA pilots, this brief demonstrates how NEAs can address funding inequities and identifies the next steps for developing a comprehensive system of NEAs that will link education resources to learning outcomes. (Contains 1 figure and 37 endnotes.)