In a pair of recent cases, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness program. In Biden v. Nebraska, which was decided 6-3, the court struck down the administration's student loan forgiveness program and agreed with the six challenging states that they had standing to sue.
The Biden-Harris Administration announced today the approval of $4.9 billion in additional student loan debt relief for 73,600 borrowers. These discharges are the result of fixes made by the Administration to income-driven repayment (IDR) forgiveness and Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF).
Student loan forgiveness.
The Education Department subsequently began accepting applications, but court battles later halted the government from discharging any debt. On June 30, the Supreme Court rejected Biden's plan, saying that the president had overstepped his authority.
Income-driven plans for federal student debt tie monthly payments to a borrower's family size and income and forgive any remaining balances after 20 or 25 years of payments.
Conservative groups are suing to block another of the Biden administration's debt-forgiveness plans. In the wake of the Supreme Court striking down President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, conservative groups are taking aim at his other efforts to deliver debt cancellation to scores of Americans.
By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its authority last year when it announced that it would cancel up to $400 billion in student loans.
New Student Loan Forgiveness Plan Could Debut In 2024
Shortly after the Supreme Court struck down Biden's initial student loan forgiveness plan, he announced that the administration would work to develop a “Plan B.” This new program is currently in development, and could be released later this year.
Many federal student loan borrowers entered 2023 hopeful to see President Joe Biden's campaign promise to forgive student debt come to fruition. That hope was dashed on June 30, when the Supreme Court voted in a 6-3 decision to block Biden's plan to forgive up to $20,000 per borrower earning less than $125,000 a year.
Of the 74,000 borrowers approved for relief today, nearly 44,000 of them are teachers, nurses, firefighters and other individuals who earned forgiveness after 10 years of public service, and close to 30,000 of them are people who have been in repayment for at least 20 years but never got the relief they earned through ...
Having a student loan will affect your credit score. Your student loan amount and payment history are a part of your credit report. Your credit reports—which impact your credit score—will contain information about your student loans, including: Amount that you owe on your loans.
Student loans disappear from credit reports 7.5 years from the date they are paid in full, charged-off, or entered default. Education debt can reappear if you dig out of default with consolidation or loan rehabilitation.
Under the Biden administration, more than 3.7 million student loan borrowers have had their debt forgiven by various executive actions.
As long as your loans were in good standing at the time they were discharged and your accounts are being reported properly to the credit reporting bureaus, you won't see a huge difference in your score. On the other hand, you could see your score drop if your account wasn't in good standing prior to the discharge.
Borrowers who have reached 20 or 25 years (240 or 300 months) worth of payments for IDR forgiveness may see their loans forgiven in Spring 2023. ED will continue to discharge loans as borrowers reach the required number of months for forgiveness. All other borrowers will see their loan accounts updated in 2024.
Collection activities are currently paused for all federal student loans through September 2024, which should protect your 2022 and 2023 federal and state tax refunds.
The average student loan debt borrowed for a four-year bachelor's degree was $30,500 in 2019-2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The average federal student loan debt has more than doubled since 2007, from $18,233 in 2007 to $37,090 at the end of 2023.
The federal government or a commercial entity owns your student loans. Private companies own all private loans. The U.S. Department of Education holds most federal loans. Both the Department of Education and private institutions partner with third parties called student loan servicers.
Failing to pay your student loan within 90 days classifies the debt as delinquent, which means your credit rating will take a hit. After 270 days, the student loan is in default and may then be transferred to a collection agency. Keeping up with your student loan payments helps improve your credit score.
Right now, anyone who receives student loan forgiveness between 2021 and 2025 will not have to pay taxes on any amount of student debt forgiveness. PSLF or IDR forgiveness is a potential result for any borrower. However, not all borrowers will reach forgiveness.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the government has paused all collections through the Treasury Offset Program until June 30, 2023. This means, as a taxpayer, the IRS won't seize your 2023 federal income tax refund for a student loan offset.
Specifically, the bill prohibits the President or the Department of Education (ED) from suspending or deferring federal student loan payments or the accrual of interest on such loans for borrowers with annual household incomes over 400% of the federal poverty line.
In most cases, the borrower no longer had any outstanding student loan reported on their credit record in February 2023, suggesting the loan may have been paid off, discharged, or aged off the borrower's credit record.
However, in June 2023, Congress passed a law preventing further extensions of the federal student loan payment pause. The U.S. Department of Education is now providing a 12-month on-ramp to repayment, starting on October 1, 2023, and ending on September 30, 2024.
Income-Based Repayment (IBR)—Depending on when you first took out loans (before or on or after July 1, 2014), payments are generally 10% or 15% of the borrower's discretionary income, but never more than the 10-year Standard repayment plan amount. The remaining unpaid balance of loans is forgiven after 20 or 25 years.