One borrower reported on Reddit that their qualifying payment total fell from close to 120 down to 94.
The U.S. Education Department is now going through payment records for Public Service Loan Forgiveness borrowers, and some are discovering that their counts were wrong. Not in their favor, either.
PSLF has been around since 2007. It was designed to erase federal student debt for people who work in public service and nonprofit jobs. Teachers, nurses, firefighters, people who work for the government at any level.
The deal is simple: make 120 qualifying payments over 10 years while working in those jobs, and the rest of your federal student loans get forgiven. About 1.2 million public servants have already made it through the program, and the average cancelled debt is close to $75,000. That is a huge amount of money to have wiped away, which is why the program means so much to the people who rely on it.
The program's history has been marked by administrative missteps. The Biden administration's review expanded credit for some paused payment periods, but it also exposed how many borrowers had been given inaccurate counts. That has left some public servants closer to forgiveness one day and farther from it the next.
Nancy Nierman, assistant director of the Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program, said her office has seen the problem up close. "We've had a few clients who saw their PSLF count drop," she said. "It's concerning when someone who relies on numbers reported to them by the government finds out that, through no fault of their own, those numbers were incorrect."
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A spokesperson for the Education Department said the agency is correcting "coding errors" made by the Biden administration. "These errors resulted in inaccurate payment counts for some borrowers," the spokesperson said. The department is working through the programming problems tied to the Biden administration and says it is "committed to ensuring that every qualifying payment is properly credited to a borrower's account."
Here is the backstory. Under the Biden administration, borrowers could ask for a fresh review of their PSLF counts. They could also get credit for some periods when payments were paused, which previously did not count toward the 120.
That review came after a 2022 Government Accountability Office report found borrowers sometimes received inaccurate payment records. The trouble goes back even further. In 2015, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned that borrowers were being pushed into forbearance, a status where interest keeps growing but PSLF credit stops.
That warning is now showing up in real accounts.
Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, says the blame belongs to the accounting, not the policy. "It was purely technical accounting errors," he said. And the fix is not all bad news. "Some borrowers are going to see their PSLF counts go up."
The Education Department did not answer questions about which changes caused the problems. That lack of detail makes it hard for borrowers to trust what they see. Without a specific explanation, the numbers cannot be verified.
The stakes go beyond a number on a screen. Borrowers with reduced counts may have to delay buying a home, getting married, or starting a family. They may also need to stay in lower-paid public-sector jobs longer than planned to stay eligible for the program. The 10-year promise can stretch far beyond that.
Nancy Nierman has practical advice for anyone in the program. Screenshot your Federal Student Aid payment totals. Keep bank statements that show your payments.
Submit the employer certification form every year and keep copies. And if a payment disappears from your count, ask the Education Department to re-evaluate your case.
The department says it is fixing the problems and will credit every qualifying payment. But the changes are happening now. If you are in PSLF, check your count, save your paperwork, and do not assume the number you see today is final. It is the only way to protect yourself.
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