President Donald Trump signs an executive order regarding institutions of higher education with Secretary of Education Linda McMahon (right) in the Oval Office of the White House on April 23, 2025, in Washington.
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
More than 500,000 federal student loan borrowers have yet to receive applications to access affordable repayment plans, according to a new court filing.
The Trump administration reported Monday that 576,609 borrowers’ applications for income-based repayment plans were still pending as of the end of February.
Many student loan borrowers rely on IDR plans to be able to afford to pay their monthly bills. This plan limits your monthly payments to a portion of your discretionary income, and the remaining debt is canceled after a set period of time (usually 20 or 25 years).
Trump officials said the Education Department did not forgive any student loan debt under the IDR plan during February.
An additional 88,170 federal student loan borrowers are waiting for responses to their Public Service Loan repurchase applications, court filings show.
Signed by President George W. Bush in 2007, PSLF offered debt cancellation to nonprofits and government employees for the first time in a decade. The buyback option introduced by the Biden administration allows borrowers seeking PSLF to make retroactive payments for months missed due to forbearance or forbearance, speeding up the timeline for forgiveness.
The Ministry of Education did not respond to requests for comment.
According to the Congressional Research Service, more than 42 million Americans have student loans, totaling more than $1.6 trillion in debt.
How has the application backlog changed?
The Department of Education has made progress in processing IDR applications. More than 626,000 applications were pending in January, compared to about 1.4 million in July.
But the pile of PSLF buybacks continues to grow. More than 86,520 borrowers were on the waiting list in January, up from 83,370 in December and 80,210 in November.
“At the current pace, if no more applications are submitted, it will take nearly three years to clear the backlog,” higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz said.
Carolina Rodriguez, director of New York’s Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program, said the relief program’s backlog could worsen as borrowers in the now-defunct Savings for a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan submit applications to access new repayment plans.
More than 7 million Biden-era student loan borrowers are still holding out after a lawsuit halted the SAVE plan, according to the Department of Education.
The Trump administration is allowing borrowers to continue their forbearance period for now, but plans to resume collecting interest over the summer and end the suspension this spring.
“In the coming weeks, we will be issuing clear guidance on next steps for borrowers enrolled in illegal SAVE plans, including details on how to move them to legal repayment plans,” Education Undersecretary Nicholas Kent said in a statement to CNBC earlier this month after a federal appeals court ordered the termination of SAVE plans.
Borrowers whose high default rates prevent relief
Experts say it comes at a particularly difficult time for student loan borrowers to access relief programs. About 9 million borrowers were in default as of December 2025, according to Kantrowitz’s analysis of government data.
About 42% of federal student loan borrowers say their monthly payments are making it difficult to cover basic needs like food and housing, according to a recent study by the Institute for College Access & Success and the Data for Progress Institute.
The Biden administration introduced initiatives to provide loan forgiveness and bill reductions to borrowers, but those measures were blocked by Republican-led legal challenges. President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will soon eliminate several affordable repayment plans and other relief options.
