Federal Student Aid plans to open the 2027-28 Free Application for Federal Student Aid to every applicant no later than Oct. 1, 2026, and the form arrives with a change that breaks from a long-standing Pell Grant rule. For the first time, some applicants who already hold a bachelor’s degree, ordinarily disqualifying under the Pell…

Parents planning to borrow for a child’s college costs this fall are running into a ceiling that did not exist before this year. Federal Parent PLUS loans first disbursed on or after July 1, 2026 are capped at $20,000 per dependent student per year, with a $65,000 lifetime limit for that same student, according to…

Federal student loan borrowers taking out new loans now have a single income-driven repayment option, and it is built around a much longer payoff clock than the plans it replaced. The Repayment Assistance Plan, available since July 1, 2026, sets any remaining balance to be forgiven only after 30 years of qualifying payments. For households…

Borrowers in the first wave of the SAVE repayment plan’s wind-down have until Sept. 29 to choose a new federal repayment plan, and the payment jump waiting for some of them is steep. Forbes reported that one example payment shifts from $170 a month under SAVE to somewhere between $650 and $1,150 once a borrower…

A federal lawsuit filed Sept. 24 accuses the Department of Education of leaving $4.6 billion in cancelled student debt on the credit files of more than 300,000 borrowers whose loans were supposed to have been wiped out. The suit, Woods v. Department of Education, says loans tied to three shuttered for-profit schools, ITT Technical Institute,…

Nearly one in five federal student loan borrowers who are currently in active repayment, close to 20% of that group, is at least 30 days behind on payments, according to portfolio data Federal Student Aid posted on September 22. The figure describes borrowers who are still classified as making payments on schedule under their repayment…

More than 9.3 million federal student loan borrowers were in default as of June 30, holding a combined $234 billion in loans, according to updated portfolio data Federal Student Aid posted on September 22. The figure covers only the federally managed share of the loan portfolio, which spans 42.3 million recipients and more than $1.7…

Credit Acceptance Corporation, a Michigan-based subprime auto lender, will forgive more than $630 million in car-loan debt owed by more than 55,000 borrowers nationwide under a settlement announced September 17, 2026. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, New York Attorney General Letitia James and a bipartisan group of states said the deal also requires $60 million…

Most of the money in the Credit Acceptance settlement never moves. More than $630 million of it is debt that simply stops existing on the books of a subprime auto lender, which helps 55,000 borrowers but puts nothing in a mailbox. The part that does move is $60 million, and it is going into a…

Federal student loan borrowers who want a full percentage point knocked off their interest rate have until September 30, 2026, to enroll in automatic payments. The discount itself already began July 1, but the U.S. Department of Education gave borrowers a window to sign up and still qualify for the larger reduction. Miss the date,…