The Department of History and the University of Houston offer a wide array of financial assistance to graduate students. This assistance includes teaching, instructional, and research assistantships, fellowships, and prizes. Teaching and instructional assistantships (and most fellowships) include a monthly stipend, and health benefits. Only full-time Ph.D. students are eligible for the Graduate Tuition Fellowship (GTF), and this award is not linked with teaching, instructional, or research assistant employment status. M.A. students are eligible to receive Teaching Assistantships for up to two years. Ph.D. students on the B.A. to Ph.D. Track are eligible for five years of support from the Graduate Tuition Fellowship and as Teaching Assistants. Ph.D. students on the M.A. to Ph.D. Track are eligible for four years of support from the Graduate Tuition Fellowship and as Teaching Assistants. 

In addition, the department offers a Public History Fellowship, the Louis and Frieda Kestenberg scholarship, and the Presidential Fellowship to promising incoming graduate students. Murray Miller Scholarships are available for doctoral students conducting dissertation research.

Each year the department offers four major student awards: The Stanley Siegal award (best paper on Texas history); the Margaret Henson award (best paper on women’s history); the John O. King award (outstanding graduate student); the Ernesto Valdes Prize (oral history).

The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences administers the CLASS Dissertation Fellowship for Ph.D. students at the ABD level and the University makes available some scholarship money for graduate students studying abroad.