The Navient student loan settlement is an agreement between Navient and attorneys general for 39 states and the District of Columbia to resolve lawsuits that accused Navient of: Giving high-interest loans to students who it knew likely could not repay the debt.
Settled: State lawsuits
Several states filed lawsuits against Navient over the years, citing unfair lending practices, deception and mismanagement of loan products.
In addition, Navient will pay $142.5 million to the attorneys general. A total of $95 million in restitution payments of about $260 each will be distributed to approximately 350,000 federal loan borrowers who were placed in certain types of long-term forbearances.
The settlement, announced Jan. 13, 2022, comes after five years of litigation with states. A similar lawsuit filed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is ongoing. Navient was, at one time, the largest student loan servicer after Sallie Mae, its parent company, shifted its portfolio there in 2014.
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In January, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced that Navient agreed to cancel $1.7 billion in subprime private student debt owed by 66,000 student loan borrowers, primarily at for-profit schools such as ITT Technical Institute and the Art Institute.
Here are the eligibility criteria: You must have borrowed a private student loan from Navient or its predecessor, Sallie Mae, between 2002 and 2014 while attending certain for-profit schools like the Art Institute, ITT Technical Institute, and others. You can see a full list of schools at navientagsettlement.com.
To be eligible for this payment, borrowers must have entered repayment on their federal student loans before 2015, have been eligible for an income-driven repayment plan but instead gotten guided to entering forbearance over the phone by a Navient employee, and have kept that forbearance in place for at least two years ...
These following states, and the District of Columbia, are included in the settlement: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, ...
If you have not repaid your loan in full after you made the equivalent of 20 years of qualifying monthly payments, any outstanding balance on your loan will be forgiven.
If you had Navient federal student loans owned by the US Department of Education, your loans have moved to a new loan servicer. In 2021, Navient exited the federal student loan servicing industry, transferring its caseload of 5.6 million student loans to Aidvantage, which is owned by student loan giant Maximus.
The restitution-participating states are: AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, HI, IA, IL, IN, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MN, MO, NC, NE, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, TN, VA, WA, and WI. Cancellation of Certain Private Loans.
Attorneys general of the following 38 states plus the District of Columbia were part of the lawsuit against Navient: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, ...
Any outstanding balance on your loan will be forgiven if you haven't repaid your loan in full after 20 years or 25 years, depending on when you received your first loans. You may have to pay income tax on any amount that is forgiven.
Even though hundreds of thousands of Navient borrowers will receive loan forgiveness, millions still won't. The cancellations are also largely going to accounts that opened during the early 2000s, so if you opened an account with Navient more recently, it's unlikely that you qualify.
Is Navient Federal or Private? While Congress originally created Sallie Mae to support the federal student loan program, it was eventually privatized. Navient is a private company that the U.S. Department of Education once hired to service its federal loans.
No, there is no coronavirus-related loan forgiveness for federal student loans. The Department of Education and your loan servicer should be your trusted sources of information about official loan forgiveness options. You never have to pay for help with your federal student aid.
2. What's changing? Navient asked to end their contract to service federal student loans this year. The contract will run until December 2023, but the company is already transferring its loans to a new company — Aidvantage, which is the loan servicing division of a company called Maximus.
What's happening. If Navient was your federal loan servicer, your loans have been transferred to Aidvantage.
Undergraduate loans are forgiven after 20 years, while graduate school loans are forgiven after 25 years.
Today, Navient and Sallie Mae are distinct, separate companies. But they were once under the same umbrella company. When Sallie Mae started in 1972, it serviced federal student loan debt. It eventually took on private student loans, too.
If you have student loans owned by the U.S. Department of Education (ED), you now have a new loan servicer: Aidvantage.
Negotiating a student loan settlement with Navient is possible, but it's not guaranteed. You may be able to negotiate a settlement if your loans are in or near default and you have enough cash to pay the settlement amount in full or over a short period of time.