Federal loan servicers started mailing individual exit notices on July 1, each one giving its recipient 90 days from that letter to choose a new repayment plan. There is no single date closing this window; the deadline arrives on its own schedule for each account, set by whichever company services that loan. About 7.5 million…

A rule that has been running quietly since the start of July is close to producing its first visible results. Federal student loan servicers began issuing notices on July 1, 2026 to borrowers left in limbo when the SAVE repayment plan was struck down, and every notice carries its own 90-day deadline to choose a…

For more than a year, the federal agency built to police banks, lenders, and debt collectors has not opened a single new case against one. The Bureau’s own public log of enforcement actions runs 386 entries deep, and the most recent one is dated August 21, 2025. Nothing has been added since. For a household…

Federal student loan borrowers who set up automatic payments before September 30, 2026, will lock in a full percentage point off their interest rate through June 2028, the U.S. Department of Education announced. The reduction applies to Direct Loans issued after July 1, 2012, and arrives alongside new income-driven repayment options rolling out the same…

The rule that would have erased medical bills from credit reports nationwide never made it past a federal courtroom in Texas. Judge Sean Jordan vacated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s medical-debt regulation in July 2025, months before its compliance deadlines arrived, ending a rule that had been finalized only in January of that year. Millions…

Taking out a federal student loan this fall means signing up for a repayment formula that no longer bends toward multiple menus of options. Anyone whose first loan disburses on or after July 1, 2026 is routed into a single income-based plan, the Repayment Assistance Plan, that sets the monthly bill as a percentage of…

Tax refunds that would normally be seized to pay down a defaulted federal student loan are, for now, staying in borrowers’ bank accounts. The freeze on wage garnishment and refund seizures tied to federal student loan defaults has been in place since mid-January 2026, and more than eight months later the Department of Education still…

A payment that used to renew itself every month without a borrower lifting a finger now requires an active decision for most federal student loan borrowers. Enrollment in that automatic-payment option collapsed sometime after 2020 and has not come close to recovering, even as a new discount tied directly to it took effect this year.…

A single toggle inside a loan servicer’s online account, the one labeled “auto pay,” now carries a full percentage point of interest savings for federal student loan borrowers, but only for those who switch it on before September 30, 2026. The Department of Education is layering a new 0.75 percentage point discount on top of…

Revolving consumer credit outstanding reached $1.3161 trillion in July, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest G.19 Consumer Credit release. The July figure is shown in billions of dollars as $1,316.1 billion and is marked preliminary; the release date is September 8, 2026. That is a national stock of credit, not a measure of a typical…