Missed payments, inaccurate statements, and long delays: The return of monthly federal student loan bills is going as well as everyone expected
Have you run into issues restarting your student loan payments? If you’d like to tell us about it, email senior writer Alicia Adamczyk at alicia.adamczyk@fortune.com.
After a three-and-a-half-year hiatus, the federal college debt repayment system has a few kinks it needs to work out.
Federal student loan payments returned in October 2023 amid warnings from experts that issues could, and likely would, arise after the prolonged pause. Advocates worried that loan servicers wouldn’t be properly prepared for restarting monthly payments for over 28 million borrowers all at once, and that households stretched thin by inflation wouldn’t be able to afford yet another bill. The Biden administration acknowledged the challenges, creating what it called an “on-ramp” to repayment, in which missed payments won’t lead to delinquency or default for the first 12 months.
A few months into the restart shows that everyone was right to worry. The payment restart has been marked by issue after issue, including servicers miscalculating the monthly bill amounts and sending borrowers other incorrect payment information. In many cases, borrowers simply aren’t making payments at all.
One issue stems from the Biden administration’s creation of a new, more generous income-driven repayment plan known as SAVE. The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA), one of the companies the federal government contracts with the service loans, based initial payments off poverty guidelines from the wrong year (2022 instead of 2023), among other issues, resulting in higher payments of hundreds of thousands of borrowers, according to the government.
Affected borrowers should have been notified by their servicer and placed into administrative forbearance, which means they will not need to make any payments and interest will not accrue. They should also be repaid for any overages. The U.S. Department of Education withheld $7.2 million in payments from MOHELA for the mistakes.
The issues don’t stop there. Last week, the Education Department announced it was withholding payments from three of the servicers—Aidvantage, EdFinancial, and Nelnet—that it says “failed to meet contractual obligations to send timely billing statements” to over 750,000 borrowers in the first month of repayment.
And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which is overseeing the return to repayment on behalf of borrowers, finds the process has been plagued by “significant delays” in processing applications for income-driven repayment plans (which can lead to unnecessarily higher bills), average hold times of over an hour when borrowers try to contact their servicer for help, and inaccurate billing statements.
Borrowers aren’t paying
Servicing mistakes that can be more or less easily rectified is one problem. Perhaps a larger one is that many borrowers simply haven’t starting making their payments again.
At the end of December, U.S. Undersecretary of Education James Kvaal wrote in a blog post that just 60% of borrowers who owed a payment in October had made it by mid-November. Some of the missing payees were not making payments before the pause, either; still, it highlights that millions may not be able to afford their payments or may be confused by the restart process.
Juniper, a 31-year-old borrower, previously told Fortune that her servicer had put her on the wrong repayment plan, resulting in higher monthly payments she could not afford due to a recent job loss.
“It’s been a nightmare,” she said. “I might not starve, but I certainly won’t be thriving.”
Of course, borrowers like Juniper who recognize the problem need to call their servicer to fix it—and that’s increasingly difficult as wait times have grown longer and longer, as reported by the CFPB.
While the 12-month “on-ramp” to repayment will protect borrowers from the worst financial consequences of missing a payment, it is not the same as the COVID-19 payment pause. During the on ramp, interest accrues as usual no matter if borrowers make a payment or not.
