Temporary expanded public service loan forgiveness reddit

Can you please clarify this for me? I’ve now worked in healthcare full time for over 11 years. I transferred my loans to fedloan and I’ve been on IDR since July of 2019 with my intent to reapply for pslf and get denied and then apply for TEPSLF (I think? Can’t remember the new acronym right now)

Are you saying my IDR payments don’t count bc I’m only doing the IDR payment and nothing above the IDR payment?

Theoretically March should be my last IDR payment to Fedloan before I reapply because of the CARES Act passing but I’m due for a payment April 15th. I’m so confused and I’m so sick of jumping through these hoops hoping one day it might pay off!!!

Welcome to r/PSLF, reddit's foremost sub focused exclusively on the US Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. If you're new here, you're probably looking for information about the PSLF Waivers, which are expiring at the end of the month. Read on for more information.

(If you're looking for information on the Biden-Harris loan forgiveness of up to $20,000 per borrower announced in August, that's a completely separate program and you should look to the pinned megathread in r/StudentLoans for information.)

What is PSLF?

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was created in 2007 and is designed to forgive the entire remaining balance of a borrower's eligible student loans after the borrower works for ten years (120 months) in public service and makes payments on the loans during that time. More than $12 billion worth of loans have been forgiven under PSLF since forgiveness began in 2017.

What are the PSLF Waivers?

Due to a number of factors -- related to poor communication and unclear rules in PSLF's early years and the COVID-19 pandemic -- PSLF was not reaching as many borrowers as it could have and many borrowers who could have been eligible were excluded due to technicalities or had to restart their path to 120 payments from zero because they didn't take measures to ensure their eligibility immediately upon starting eligible work. In 2018, Congress enacted a fix for some of those issues via the Temporary Expansion of PSLF (TEPSLF) program, but TEPSLF had limited funding and only addressed part of the problem. In October 2021, the Biden Administration used emergency authorities enabled by the COVID-19 pandemic to implement a broader series of rule changes to help more borrowers access PSLF and on a quicker timeframe. These rule changes are collectively called the Limited PSLF Waivers.

How do I access the waivers?

It's easy! Any borrower who has ever submitted the two-page PSLF Form to certify that they have (or had) eligible employment while they had eligible loans by October 31, 2022 will get the benefit of the waivers. (This is a submission deadline, you'll still get the benefits even if processing takes longer.) The best way to generate the form is with the government's PSLF Help Tool, this will generate a PDF that you and your employer will sign, then you submit it to MOHELA (the federal loan servicer that is running the PSLF program) for processing. Make sure to allow time for those signatures and submission to MOHELA -- don't wait until the last days of October to start!

What are eligible loans?

PSLF is only available for federal student loans under the "Direct Loan" program -- these are the primary form of federal student loan today. If your loans are all "Direct" or "DL" then they are eligible for PSLF. (Note that the loans have to be in Repayment status in order to get credit toward PSLF, so time while they were on in-school deferment or some forbearances won't count even if you had eligible employment at the time.) If you have other kinds of federal student loans (like older loans under the defunct FFEL program or Perkins loan program or loans from other parts of the federal government, like Health Profession Student Loans from HHS), then they can be converted into PSLF-eligible Direct loans through the Department of Education's loan consolidation process. Consolidation pays off your existing loans and converts them into a new Direct loan. (This is different from private refinancing/consolidation, which turns your loans into a new private loan outside the federal system. Private loans aren't eligible for PSLF and cannot be converted into an eligible type.)

If you have Parent PLUS federal loans, they are eligible for PSLF if they are Direct. But keep in mind that the parent is the borrower, so the parent will need to have eligible employment to get them forgiven via PSLF. The student's employment cannot be used to get forgiveness on a Parent PLUS loan.

Wait, I thought consolidating will reset my PSLF count?

That's normally true -- because consolidating creates a new loan, that loan starts with all of its forgiveness counters at zero. But this is one of the waived rules. Under the PSLF Waivers, payments made while working in eligible employment will be counted even if they happened on a loan that was later consolidated and even if the pre-consolidation loan was not eligible for PSLF (FFELP, Perkins, etc.). This is probably the most significant of the waived rules -- there is no penalty to consolidating if you do it during the waiver period. If you are going to consolidate any of your loans, you should consolidate all of them together because the waivers will give the consolidation loan the highest possible PSLF count among all the loans that are included within it.

I need to consolidate to make my loans eligible, should I do it now?

YES! If you need to consolidate (not everyone does), then you must have both your consolidation application and a PSLF Form submitted on or before October 31st. Again, this is a submission deadline -- even if you submit them today, they will not be processed by that date but that's okay.

What is eligible employment?

PSLF looks at the identity of your employer, not the specific job you do. Eligible employment is on a full-time basis with a US government (Federal, State, Local, or Tribal), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization (unless it's a labor union or political party), or any other kind of non-profit organization if it provides one of the listed public services. If you work for any other kind of employer, if you aren't employed directly by the eligible entity (e.g. your actual employer is a contractor or staffing company) or if you are not an employee (1099 / independent contractor), then your work doesn't count for PSLF.

I wasn't on an eligible repayment plan, can I still get forgiveness?

YES! Under the waivers, any time that your loans were in repayment status and you had eligible employment will count. That's true regardless of what repayment plan you were on, whether you paid on time, or paid the correct amount -- as long as your loans didn't fall into delinquency or default, that time will count. (Some of this duplicates the relief made available under the TEPSLF program discussed above, but the waivers are broader and have unlimited funding.) Going forward, once the COVID-19 loan pause ends in January, you'll need to be on one of the income-driven repayment plans in order to add to your PSLF count. So apply for IDR now if you're not already on one.

My loans were in forbearance or deferment for a long time, can I still get forgiveness?

Maybe! Under the usual PSLF rules, deferment and forbearance time cannot count for PSLF (other than the special COVID-19 interest-free forbearance, which does count). In April 2022, the Biden Administration announced a second set of student loans waivers focused on the income-driven repayment plans. These IDR Waivers will allow for some periods of deferment and forbearance to count as eligible both IDR forgiveness and PSLF (if you had eligible employment at the time).

I don't have ten years of public service yet, what should I do?

Submit the PSLF Form anyway. Your loans will only be forgiven after you show 120 payments while working for an eligible employer, but you can (and should!) submit the PSLF Form to certify your employment as you go. This will do several things: First it will flag your account as PSLF-seeking, which will transfer your loans to MOHELA (the one servicer handling the PSLF program) and you'll be targeted for communications about any future developments to the program. Second, MOHELA will review your account, confirm that you're on-track, and either alert you to any problems or tell you how many qualifying payments (of the 120 needed) you have so far. Third, if you submit the form by October 31, the Department of Education (ED) will come in after MOHELA and make any account adjustments you're entitled to from the waivers. The waivers are "sticky" -- any payments that are added to your count because of the waivers will remain in your count permanently, even after the waivers expire. Fourth, certifying as you go will make getting forgiveness easier at the end, since you won't have to go back and get ten years' worth of employment certifications and the reviewers won't need to look at that whole time either.

You should submit a fresh PSLF Form about once a year and whenever you leave an eligible employer. The 120 payments for PSLF don't need to be consecutive or with the same employer, so you could stop working, drop to part-time, or move to an ineligible employer without losing your progress. Your count will pick up where you left off once you return to eligible employment.

How long does the process take?

Be patient. Each step of the PSLF process -- consolidating (if you need to), transferring your loans to MOHELA (if they aren't already your servicer), MOHELA processing your PSLF Form under the regular rules), ED applying the waivers, and (if you've reached 120) processing the forgiveness -- is currently taking many weeks. From start to finish, you might wait 4-6 months between submitting your paperwork and getting final forgiveness even if you're eligible today. This is due to a recent switch in servicers (FedLoan Servicing was the PSLF servicer until the summer when that role move to MOHELA), a surge in popularity for PSLF driven by the waiver deadline, and general increase in workload for servicers due to other recent initiatives like the Biden-Harris forgiveness program.

I heard that forgiveness might be taxed, is that true?

Tax law is complicated [citation needed] and journalists are not always careful in their wording. For the Biden-Harris forgiveness program announced in August -- which will forgive up to $20K of federal loans for many borrowers -- some states will tax that forgiveness as income, either because they haven't mirrored the recent change to federal law that made the forgiveness tax-free federally or because they choose to specifically tax it. This has generated many recent headlines. But PSLF is an older program that relies on a different provision of the tax code dating back to 1984 for being federally tax-free. Every state -- except Mississippi -- has mirrored that portion of the tax code in their own income tax law. Regardless of the amount forgiven, PSLF is not taxable income at the federal level nor is it taxable at the state level... unless you're in Mississippi.

I heard about refunds from forgiveness, what's that about?

This actually is part of regular PSLF -- not the waivers -- but many more borrowers are getting refunds because the waivers have increased their counts. Under PSLF, once you've made 120 payments while working in eligible employment, you're eligible for forgiveness. But that forgiveness isn't automatic -- you still have to submit the PSLF Form to prove that you had the eligible employment -- so it's possible for your loans to remain active and you to keep paying on them for months or even years after you became eligible, until you submit that paperwork. (You can also keep paying while your paperwork is processing if you don't want to request an administrative forbearance.) Because you're eligible once you make your 120th qualifying payment, anything you pay beyond that is part of the balance that PSLF forgives. So all PSLF-forgiven borrowers automatically get refunds of anything they've paid against the forgiven loan after their 120th qualifying payment. (Note that these are only payments against the loan that is forgiven, so if you made more than 120 payments against a loan that you later consolidated, those won't be refunded. Only payments on the consolidation loan will be refunded. Also, if you stopped paying when the pandemic forbearance began, you may get credit for more than 120 qualifying payments, but not be entitled to a refund because you didn't pay anything -- more specifically, you're entitled to be refunded what you actually paid, which was $0.)

This is separate from refunds based on the COVID-19 loan pause that borrowers can request from their servicers. If you paid against loans that you didn't have to (because they were paused), you can request those payments back. You should do this if you're aiming for PSLF (because the pause counts as an eligible payment without you paying anything) but the recent news about these refunds relates to the Biden-Harris forgiveness program, not PSLF.

I have more questions about the waivers

Great! Post them below.

How long will temporary Expanded Public Service Loan Forgiveness last?

Is there still funding for Tepslf?

How long does the Tepslf process take?

What is the temporary expanded PSLF?