Whether you have made 120 qualifying payments, or not, you should fill out and submit the PSLF form annually or whenever you change employers.
Borrowers can continue to submit PSLF forms, but they will not be reviewed until the transition is completed. After July 1, the department will resume processing PSLF employment certifications and loan forgiveness requests, and borrowers should be able to access their PSLF data.
For each lump-sum payment made by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) toward your Direct Loans as part of one of the student loan repayment programs it administers, you will receive credit for up to 12 future qualifying payments for PSLF if you also have qualifying employment during those future months.
To benefit from PSLF, you should complete and submit the PSLF form every year while you're making progress toward PSLF. We will use the information you provide on the form to inform you if your employment qualifies and to confirm if you're making qualifying PSLF payments.
If you have applied for PSLF before, you can log into studentaid.gov and find out how many qualifying payments you have made on your account. If you have not applied for PSLF yet, you will need to fill out an application.
One of the notable drawbacks of PSLF for doctors is the required commitment. To be eligible for forgiveness, you must make 120 qualifying payments, which essentially means 10 years of service in a qualifying organization.
Due to changes in PSLF regulation, you can now buy back certain months in your payment history to make them qualifying payments for PSLF. Specifically, you can buy back months that don't count as qualifying payments because you were in an ineligible deferment or forbearance status.
If you meet the eligibility requirements, you can reapply for PSLF or TEPSLF after you've been in repayment for at least 10 years. *As a reminder, the time your loans were in an in-school status, the grace period, certain periods of deferment or forbearance do not count toward the 10 years.
In July 2024, AFT sued MOHELA for a wide range of unlawful practices, including illegally executing a “call deflection” scheme to deny service to borrowers who need help.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) is a federal program that can erase your student loan balance after you make 10 years' worth of monthly payments, for a total of 120 payments, while working for the government or a nonprofit organization.
You don't get reported when you're in forbearance. During the on-ramp period (through Sept. 30, 2024), we automatically put your loan in a forbearance for the payments you missed. Here's what this means: Your account was no longer considered delinquent and was made current.
After you've reached 120 payments and all other PSLF requirements are met, you must request forgiveness of your remaining loan balance using the PSLF form. After this request is made, a final review of your account will be performed to process forgiveness, which will take about 60 business days.
Can I certify my own qualifying employment? Yes, you may certify your own employment if you are the only employee of the organization who can do so.
Parent PLUS loans can potentially be forgiven after 10 years under specific conditions, such as through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program after consolidation into a direct consolidation loan. Parent borrowers must enroll in the Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR) plan to qualify for PSLF.
The new form essentially combines the employment certification form and the forgiveness application to be one form. Following the StudentAid.gov update, borrowers will only need to submit this one form to certify their employment or to be considered for forgiveness under PSLF or TEPSLF.
Typically, months in forbearance and deferment do not count towards PSLF. However, months during the COVID-19 payment pause (March 2020-September 2023), months that qualify under the IDR Adjustment, and months where loans are being placed on administrative forbearance after the repayment restart will count toward PSLF.
If you qualify for student loan forgiveness or discharge in full, and have applied if necessary, you will get a notification that you no longer need to make payments. In some cases, you may even get a refund, depending on the program you applied under.
59% of denied applications were rejected due to too few qualifying payments. 26% of denied applications were due to missing information. As of November 2020, $118.5 billion was the total outstanding balance of borrowers eligible for PSLF.
To help you track your progress toward qualifying for PSLF, we recommend that you submit the PSLF form annually or when you change employers. It will make it much easier once you are ready to apply for forgiveness after 10 years of employment in public service!
It may initially lower your credit score as the forgiven debt could be reported as “income,” which may increase your overall income-to-debt ratio. However, over time, having fewer loans and lower debt could improve your credit score.
Loans serviced by MOHELA? If you faxed or mailed your PSLF form to MOHELA it may take up to 14 days for your mohela.com account to note that the form was received. Please allow at least 90 business days for your form to be processed.
If you've been making payments toward PSLF, you can view your progress in your My Aid page by following these steps: Log in to your StudentAid.gov account. From your Dashboard, navigate to “My Aid.” Select “View Details” to open your My Aid page, then scroll down to PSLF/TEPSLF Payment Progress.
All student loan forgiveness programs only offer a one-time reward. After a student loan forgiveness program has ended, you can't apply for the same forgiveness program again to pay off your debt, even if you've met the conditions for that program.