The Indonesia Smart Program (Program Indonesia Pintar/PIP) is a government initiative aimed at ensuring equal access to education for students from underprivileged families, including those at the junior high school (SMP) level. However, at the school level, the management of PIP recipient data still faces several challenges, particularly in data searching and utilization, due to the increasing volume of data and the use of simple or manual search methods. These conditions can lead to delays in obtaining information and reduce the accuracy of decision-making. Therefore, an effective information retrieval system is needed to manage and search PIP recipient data efficiently. This study aims to design and develop an Information Retrieval System for PIP recipient data at the junior high school level using the Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method. The TF-IDF method is applied to assign weights to terms in each document, enabling the system to identify and rank documents based on their relevance to user queries. The test results show that the system is able to measure document relevance accurately, where documents D3 and D4 obtain the highest similarity value of 0.099586089 and are classified as highly relevant, while other documents show lower similarity values down to zero. These results are also supported by graphical visualization, which helps users compare relevance levels more clearly. Thus, the implementation of the TF-IDF method has proven to be effective in supporting accurate, efficient, and systematic searching and management of PIP recipient data at the junior high school level.