PSLF Payment Counts Drop as Education Department Corrects Errors

Key Points

• Two unrelated problems are hitting Public Service Loan Forgiveness borrowers at once: July and August payments that haven’t posted yet, and the Education Department rescinding qualifying months it says were credited in error during the Biden-era account adjustment.
• Our review of affected borrower accounts points to a narrow pattern: forbearance months other than processing forbearance, plus months in the Extended and Extended Graduated repayment plans that were counted when they shouldn’t have been.
• Borrowers need to validate their own counts using the MyAid TXT File and compare that to their records of PSLF certification and payments.

Borrowers chasing Public Service Loan Forgiveness have spent the past two weeks watching their qualifying payment counts move in the wrong direction. Some lost six months. Some lost more.

The fear running through borrower forums is that the Trump administration is quietly unwinding PSLF, or reversing the one-time income-driven repayment account adjustment that brought millions of borrowers years closer to forgiveness. Based on the accounts we’ve reviewed and what the Department has confirmed on the record, that is not what’s happening.

What is happening is narrower, more technical, and because the Department has explained almost none of it publicly, considerably more damaging to borrower trust than it needed to be. A banner on StudentAid.gov has told borrowers only that their counts are wrong and that a fix is coming. Here is what we’re seeing after analyzing dozens of reports and borrower accounts.

Problem One: July and August Payments Haven’t Posted

The smaller of the two issues is a posting lag. Payments made in July and August are not showing up in PSLF counts on StudentAid.gov for a large number of borrowers, a likely side effect of the system overhaul that took effect July 1 to implement new loan limits and repayment plans.

This one is a data problem, not a policy decision. We’ve heard unconfirmed reports that the payment counter should update within 60 to 90 days, and payments made during that window still count. However, it’s simply another reminder about why you need to keep your own proof of payment and employment throughout the process.

The frustrating part is the waiting, particularly for anyone sitting at 118 or 119 payments who can’t tell whether they’ve finished. Those borrowers are also the ones most likely to be weighing a PSLF buyback request, which is hard to evaluate when the underlying count is unreliable.

Problem Two: The Department Is Lowering PSLF Counts

The bigger issue is that the Education Department is rescinding qualifying months from borrowers’ trackers. The Department said it notified the vast majority of affected borrowers, but many have reported simply watching their totals shrink with no communication at all. Sadly, the communication pattern is familiar to anyone who followed the MOHELA false delinquency notices earlier this year.

Call center staff initially described the drops as a data error headed for correction, which many borrowers reasonably read as a promise that the lost months were coming back. Forbes reported on the resulting panic in early August, as borrowers compared notes on Reddit and found no consistent explanation. It fit a long pattern of student loan servicer errors that borrowers are left to untangle themselves.

Then, the Department of Education, in statements to POLITICO and Forbes, said the agency had found “PSLF counter code errors” traceable to changes made in May 2024. The College Investor asked the Department to confirm the specifics. The full statement received reads:

While revamping the federal student aid systems for the July 1 changes, FSA identified multiple PSLF counter code errors stemming from changes implemented in May 2024 under the Biden Administration. These errors resulted in inaccurate payment counts for some borrowers. Like other missteps caused by the previous Administration, FSA has resolved the issue and already notified the vast majority of affected borrowers of updates to their payment counts. The Department remains committed to ensuring that every qualifying payment is properly credited to a borrower’s account.

The statement confirms the PSLF count changes were intentional and pins them to May 2024, and it says the work is done. It does not say what was corrected, and borrowers still watching their counts move are left to interpret the word “resolved” without any additional assurance.

What the Pattern Actually Shows

The Department has not said which months it removed or why. Our review of borrower accounts and records suggests the reversals cluster around two categories: incorrectly counted forbearance time, and borrowers enrolled in a non-qualifying repayment plan.

The first category covers forbearance periods other than processing forbearance. A 60-day processing forbearance while a servicer processes an IDR application counts toward PSLF, while a general or hardship forbearance never has, outside the temporary waivers that closed in 2022 and 2024. Our breakdown of which payments and periods count toward PSLF lays out the full eligibility set.

The second category involves borrowers in the Extended Repayment Plan or the Graduated Repayment Plan from late 2024 forward. Neither plan has ever been a qualifying repayment plan for PSLF, yet payments made under them appear to have been credited anyway.

While it’s frustrating for borrowers relying on the PSLF payment tracker for eligibility, those months were never eligible to be credited. That’s cold comfort to a borrower who chose a repayment plan based on a number they believed to be accurate.

Not every reduction fits these patterns, and there may be genuine errors still in play. If your situation doesn’t match either category, check your records and file a PSLF Reconsideration Request for any missing eligible months.

Why This Isn’t a PSLF Rollback

These changes have sparked concerns that the Department of Education is rolling back Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Based on what we’ve seen, that is not the case.

PSLF is written into statute. The Secretary of Education cannot repeal it by memo, and forgiveness already granted and discharged is, for practical purposes, final. We covered this in detail in our analysis of whether a president can claw back student loan forgiveness.

Adjusting a payment counter is different. No debt is being un-forgiven — only a tracker is being changed. That is within the Department’s legal authority to do, and correcting inaccurate payment counts is something it should do. The frustrating part for borrowers is that they rely on this data to be accurate, and this is yet another issue in the decade-plus string of errors and changes that PSLF borrowers have had to navigate.

The Real Failure Here Is Silence

We put five questions to the Department: which categories of months were pulled, how many borrowers were affected and by how many months, whether any counts were reduced in error and whether those months would be restored automatically, the current processing time for a reconsideration request, and when July and August payments would post. None were answered.

Beyond its brief public statement, the Department has released nothing describing what it corrected or whether borrowers who lost legitimate months will get them back. Advocacy groups including the Student Debt Crisis Center have called for a payment pause until the errors are sorted out, echoing the long waits already affecting PSLF buyback requests.

That lack of transparent communication turned a technical correction into a widespread panic. Had the Department published a plain-language notice naming the forbearance types and repayment plans involved, most borrowers would have had enough information to evaluate whether their own reduction was accurate — and those with legitimate grievances could have filed for reconsideration immediately rather than spending weeks in the dark.