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Borrowers have faced long waits for decisions on Public Service Loan Forgiveness and income-driven repayment forgiveness applications.
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The backlog of income-driven repayment plan transfer applications has shrunk significantly.
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Faster processing matters for the millions of borrowers who must leave the now-defunct Saving on a Valuable Education plan.
The Department of Education is still struggling to keep up with student loan borrowers’ applications for discharges.
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Buyback program had nearly 90,000 applications pending as of March 2026. Some borrowers have waited over a year for their PSLF Buyback application to be processed. Yet, the Department of Education said in a social media post on April 7 that, because of high volumes of applications, there is “no estimated timeline” for processing.
“It is not uncommon for requests to take many months, and submitting duplicate requests or contacting your loan servicer will not speed up the process,” the Department of Education said.
After 10 years of monthly payments, the PSLF program forgives the remaining loan balance for borrowers who work for the government or a nonprofit. The buyback program lets eligible borrowers pay a lump sum equal to what they would have owed during a forbearance—months that normally don’t count toward the 10-year requirement—and receive forgiveness automatically.
The Department of Education recommends that most borrowers keep making payments while their forgiveness application is pending. However, many borrowers say their student loan payments cut into their spending and leave less to save for emergencies and retirement.
Borrowers can also pursue forgiveness through income-driven repayment plans. Since these plans lower monthly payments based on a borrower’s income, there is no set repayment period. After a borrower has made payments for 20 or 25 years, any remaining debt can be forgiven.
But borrowers who qualify for forgiveness have faced long processing delays. The Department of Education said frequent policy changes have made it hard to update the systems that identify eligible borrowers.
In March, about 21,200 borrowers had their debt discharged through an income-driven repayment plan. That is an almost sixfold increase in the total discharges between November 2025, when the Department of Education began reporting this figure, and February 2026.
The Department of Education doesn’t report the number of borrowers who have met the eligibility requirements for forgiveness but are still waiting for it under an income-driven repayment plan.
The backlog of applications to transfer into an income-driven repayment plan, which is generally done by contracted loan servicers, has been significantly reduced.
As of March 2026, there were almost 554,000 pending transfer applications. While still a major backlog, it’s a major drop from almost 2 million pending applications loan servicers had in April 2025.
Faster processing matters especially for the nearly 7.2 million borrowers who were still enrolled in the now-defunct Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan that a federal court struck down. These borrowers must choose a new income-driven repayment plan in the coming months to keep their monthly payments affordable.
“The backlog is people who applied many, many months ago for the SAVE plan specifically, or applied for…the plan with the lowest monthly payment,” said Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, an industry trade group. “Because SAVE was caught up in litigation, and we didn’t have a plan to move people out of SAVE yet at that time, those applications were pending, waiting for disposition.”
In particular, SAVE borrowers who apply to transfer and let the Department of Education or their loan servicer pull their income information directly from the IRS can be transferred the next day, Buchanan said.
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