If you’re working toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, your PSLF payment count might be lower today than it was back in July. That’s not a mistake on your end. The Education Department found its own system had been crediting months that never should have counted, and it went back and fixed the math on thousands of accounts at once.
Most borrowers found out the same way. They logged in to check their progress and saw a smaller number than they remembered. It’s a strange kind of gut punch, watching a total you’d been counting down for months suddenly jump backward.
Here’s what actually happened, and what to do if your PSLF payment count just dropped too.
Quick context if you’re new to this: PSLF wipes out your remaining federal student loan balance after you make 120 qualifying monthly payments while working full-time for a qualifying employer, usually a government agency or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Those 120 payments don’t have to be back to back. They just have to be verified, one by one, against your loan servicer’s records. That verification process is exactly where this new problem started.
The government traced the problem back to changes it made in May 2024. According to reporting from The College Investor, the Department found what it called PSLF counter code errors, and this had nothing to do with new policy. It was a technical mistake in how the system counted qualifying months.
Two kinds of months got miscounted. General and hardship forbearance periods got credited toward forgiveness, even though neither has ever actually qualified for PSLF. Payments made under the Extended and Extended Graduated repayment plans got counted too, when those plans were never eligible in the first place.
So the Department went back through the records and pulled those months out. For someone who thought they were eight months from forgiveness, a correction like that can suddenly push them a year or more further out.
There’s a separate issue stacked on this one. Payments made in July and August 2026 haven’t fully posted to a lot of accounts yet. That’s a normal processing lag, not a rejection, and those months still count once they catch up. But if you’re checking your PSLF payment count right now and it looks low, you might be looking at two problems at once: real corrections, and a temporary posting delay that hasn’t caught up yet.
| Repayment Plan | Counts Toward PSLF | What Changed in the Correction |
|---|---|---|
| Standard 10-Year Plan | Yes | No change |
| IBR, ICR, or PAYE | Yes | No change |
| Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) | Yes | No change |
| General or Hardship Forbearance | No | Wrongly credited months removed |
| Extended or Extended Graduated Plan | No | Wrongly credited months removed |
| SAVE Plan $0 Forbearance | No | Never counted toward PSLF |
Here’s the part that matters most. You don’t have to just accept whatever number shows up on the screen. Start by downloading your MyAid file from StudentAid.gov. It’s a plain text file that breaks your payment count down loan by loan, month by month, instead of just handing you one final total with no explanation.
Then compare that file against your own payment history and your approved employment certification forms. If you kept records of your job certifications and payment dates, this is the moment they earn their keep.
Worth a look if the SAVE plan changes hit you too: your real deadline before payments jump from $0 to $900.
If you find months that were removed and you believe they should count, you can file a PSLF Reconsideration Request directly through StudentAid.gov. This restarts a manual review of your specific account. It doesn’t happen automatically just because the government issued a public statement about the error.
Reconsideration requests are not instant. Federal Student Aid has said processing takes time because each case gets a manual look, not an automated one. That means weeks, sometimes longer, before you get an answer back. In the meantime, keep submitting your employment certification form every year like normal. Skipping that step while you wait on a reconsideration only creates a second gap in your record, and now you’re dealing with two problems instead of one.
Not every repayment plan got touched the same way, and that’s worth knowing before you panic. Standard 10-year payments, IBR, ICR, and PAYE were built to qualify for PSLF from the start, and those months are not part of this correction. The newer Repayment Assistance Plan counts too. The plans that got cleaned up were the ones that technically were never supposed to count in the first place.
You’re more likely to be affected if you used forbearance at any point in the last two years, switched repayment plans more than once, or spent time on the Extended or Extended Graduated plan before moving to something else. If none of that applies to you, your count was probably untouched by this specific correction, though the July and August posting lag can still apply either way.
Nobody wants to spend an evening digging through loan servicer paperwork, but a half hour with your MyAid file is a lot cheaper than losing a year of forgiveness progress you thought you already had. If you want a simple way to keep track of your own numbers while you wait on an answer, grab a no-cost tracker worth grabbing here.
Federal Student Aid says it already corrected the issue and notified most affected borrowers. But most is not all, and a quiet notice is easy to miss in a week already full of everything else.
This ties in too, if your loan account changed for other reasons recently: my student loan payment just changed and nobody warned me.
Have you checked your own PSLF payment count since August, or are you still going off the number you saw earlier this year?
Disclaimer: MoneyWisePro is not a financial advisor. This article is for general information only and is not financial advice. Confirm your own PSLF payment count directly with your loan servicer or Federal Student Aid before making decisions based on this article.
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