Student Debt Forgiveness Tracker

Student loan debt relief took center stage at the end of June when Supreme Court ruled President Biden’s $400+ billion forgiveness proposal unconstitutional. Defeated but undaunted, President Biden’s proposed income-driven repayment (IDR) changes still pose dramatic consequences and costs, as AEI’s Nat Malkus described in the Wall Street Journal and in National Affairs. The legal disputes over, and uncertainty of, these big-ticket items makes the impact on the US Treasury seem remote. They also divert attention from the federal dollars that have already gone toward forgiveness.

AEI’s Student Debt Forgiveness Tracker captures how much federal revenue has already been forgone for three reasons. First, forgiven debts are real costs that come directly from the US Treasury. Second, already forgone revenue sums to an astonishing, and growing, total. Third, future policies to forgive more student debt should be weighed in light of what has already been spent, captured below.

$411 Billion is a nearly unfathomable sum.

Click Here For A Sense of Scale

The Pause favored higher-income borrowers.

Click Here to See Who Benefitted From the Payment Pause

This tracker includes four types of forgiveness during the Trump and Biden administrations. The first is student loans discharges for borrowers who were misled by colleges or who have total and permanent disabilities. The second is existing forgiveness programs—including Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) and Teacher Loan Forgiveness (TeacherLF)—passed by Congress with multiple adjustments through executive action. The third is the extended pandemic student loan payment pause, initiated by President Donald Trump and subsequently extended by Congress, Trump, and Biden. The fourth is through Income Driven Repayment (IDR) programs, stemming from the one time IDR adjustment, from ongoing IDR forgiveness, and from the SAVE program.

Certainly, part of the forgiveness tallied below is sensible, fair, and just. How much more forgiveness might fit that description, and for whom, should be weighed in light of what has been and is being spent.

The charts below break out forgone federal student revenue by authorizing authority and by pandemic year.

Click on the tabs below to view both break outs, and click on the interactive graph to examine different sub-categories of forgone student loan revenue.

Sources of Forgone Student Loan Revenue

Loan Forgiveness Programs. The Tracker Includes 4 Loan Forgiveness Programs

PSLF, enacted in 2007, allows borrowers enrolled in income-based repayment (IBR) programs and employed in a public service occupation to have their loans forgiven after only 10 years of payments instead of 20 or 25 in other IBR programs. Nearly a quarter of US workers, including all government workers and most nonprofit employees, are PSLF eligible. PSLF totals come from the Department of Education (ED) reports and stem from three PSLF categories. Standard PSLF totals are simply labeled as PSLF to distinguish them from Temporary Expanded PSLF (TEPSLF) and PSLF waivers.

TEPSLF, passed by Congress in 2018, made more payment plans and thus more borrowers eligible for PSLF after the standard program deemed many applicants ineligible. TEPSLF was limited to $350 million in forgiveness.

Limited PSLF Waivers was a temporary program by the Biden administration that also expanded eligibility to standard PSLF requirements. With no funding limit, PSLF waiver applications were only accepted through October 31, 2022.

TeacherLF offers loan forgiveness for teachers who teach five years consecutively in Title I schools. This tracker includes loans forgiven quarterly under the TeacherLF program based on reports through fiscal year (FY) 2022, as published by ED.

Student Loan Forgiveness Programs. The Tracker Includes Two Categories of Discharges

Borrower Defense to repayment includes discharges for borrowers whose colleges closed or whose colleges misrepresented the value of attendance.

Total and Permanent (T&P Disability) Total and permanent disability includes discharges for borrowers who received forgiveness because of a verified total and permanent disability.

Pandemic Federal Student Loan Payment Pause

The Pandemic Federal Student Loan Payment Pause. The “Pause” began at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, when President Trump paused payments and interest accrual on federally held student loans. Congress extended the Pause to September 2020 in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Subsequently, Trump used executive authority to extend it another four months, and Biden has maintained it since.

The Pause not only applied to payments on student loan principal and interest—which I do not include in our accounting because the principal was not forgiven—but also stopped interest accrual and credited each month toward forgiveness requirements under IDR plans. Forgone interest accrual are only included in this tally because that is the only revenue already forgone by the government. Though payments were paused, the principal remains to be repaid or forgiven, and the marginal future increase in IDR and PSLF (which will be large) will be included in this tracker when ED reports that those amounts have actually been forgiven. For a detailed explanation of estimated costs from the Pause, see the “Pause Cost Methodology” page.

Income Driven Repayment Forgiveness

Income Driven Repayment Forgiveness. Income Driven Repayment (IDR) programs adjust borrowers payments based on their income and after a set period of successful payments, historically 20 to 25 years, the remaining balance is forgiven. In the summer of 2023, President Biden instituted a one time adjustment that credited borrowers accounts for the period of successful payments when they may have missed payments, been in deferment or forbearance. The net result is many borrowers became eligible for forgiveness in September 2023, and many more were brought closer to forgiveness. As of October 2024, ED does not provide a regular accounting of IDR forgiveness but does include totals in press releases, which this tracker depends on until a typical reporting structure is established.

SAVE. The Saving on a Valuable Education program (SAVE ) was instituted by the Biden Administration as a replacement to the REPAYE IDR program and offers substantially more generous terms to lower borrowers payments and path to forgiveness.

Categorization by Authorizing Authority

Forgone revenue is also categorized by the authorizing authority them. Authorities include Congress (e.g., for standard PSLF and TEPSLF and for the Pause costs authorized by the CARES Act) and either the Trump or Biden administrations for revenues that were forgone due to their policy actions (e.g., discharges for each administration’s extensions of the payment pause).

Categorization by Pandemic Year

The pandemic played a major role in the forgiveness of student loans; it was a rationale for the payment pause and has been used as a justification for the Biden administration’s blanket forgiveness plan, which is now before the Supreme Court. I divide forgiveness totals into the pre-pandemic period and pandemic years one to three, each running from March 1 to February 28 of each year since 2020. Given the rationale that the pandemic drove the need for the greatest amounts of forgone revenue, visualizing those amounts by time period can illuminate the plausibility of that logic.

Methodology

Dollar amounts for PSLF and TeacherLF come directly from reports published by ED (most recently for November 2022 and FY2021, respectively). For loan discharges, I tally data from ED’s press releases. (I tally press releases instead of ED’s reports under borrower defense because its reported data as of September 22 does not account for multibillion-dollar announcements from ED.) Existing estimates of the cost of the Pause are somewhat opaque, so I estimated these costs using methods explained in detail on the Pause Cost Methodology page.

AEI’s Student Debt Forgiveness Tracker Data Download

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