Public Service Loan Forgiveness: Student loan relief will definitively end in January
The official end of student loan relief is January 31, 2022
On August 6, 2021, the Biden administration announced that it will extend the student loan pause, which was previously set to expire September 30, 2021, to January 31, 2022.
The student loan moratorium has suspended payments, frozen interest rates at 0%, and postponed collections on most federal student loans since March 2020.
It is imperative that all loan holders begin to prepare now to resume repayment this coming February. The reasoning for this final extension was characterized by the Biden administration as giving “students and borrowers the time they need” to “restart” repayment.
Suspended Months Will Continue To Count Towards Forgiveness Programs
The DOE has already updated its website to reflect the new extension and has retained information confirming that these additional suspended months will be treated the same as before, continuing to count towards loan forgiveness programs, including income-driven repayment terms and Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF).
The suspended months will still count as qualifying payments for purposes of all programs, including loan rehabilitation plans for student loan borrowers who are in the process of resolving their federal student loans currently in default.
Student Loan Servicing Transfers May Be Completed By Early 2022
FedLoan Servicing and Granite State Management’s loan servicing contracts with the Department of Education will both be ending in December of this year.
If the payment pause had not been extended, 10 million+ student borrowers serviced by these two banks would have been navigating loan servicer transfers at the same time that payments were slated to resume, leading to confusion and chaos.
The extension will hopefully give the DOE enough time to transition these accounts to new loan servicers prior to resuming payments. Notifications to borrowers to prepare now for student loan servicing changes have already begun.
Don’t expect student loan cancellation
There is no indication that extending student loan relief is related in any way to wide-scale student loan cancellation.
Since April, the Biden administration has been conducting a legal review of unilateral executive authority that could be the basis for some sort of student debt cancellation via executive action. But as recently as last month the review has been stated as “ongoing”. The extension should give the administration the time it needs to complete this review.
Contact TitanPrep to Review Your Options
Our goal is to simply ensure that you remain fully informed of all current updates and understand all of the options available to you.
Most importantly, you should know exactly which compliance requirements you must maintain, and how to access important loan information and options on your own moving forward.
We are here to explain how things work, review your current status, and ensure that the appropriate documents are filed for you.
We offer our expertise in providing personalized solutions for all of your loan servicer document preparation needs. We prepare, submit, and help establish convenient resolutions with your service providers based on their criteria. Our guaranteed support, management, preparation, and submission make tedious processes easy and straightforward.