Forgiveness & Repayment Options for AES Loans

Updated on August 28, 2026

American Education Services is a student loan servicer to millions of federal and private student loan borrowers. If you have AES student loans, you might have questions about this company and how it can help you throughout the student loan repayment process. Here’s what you should know if you have student loans with AES.

What is American Education Service?

AES is a student loan servicer and guaranty agency created by the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) to oversee FFEL Loans and private student loans. In its role as a servicer, AES doesn’t provide student loans to borrowers. Instead, it acts as a middleman between the loan holder and the borrower while the account is in good standing. As a guarantor, AES agrees to pay a debt when the borrower defaults on a federal student loan.

Are AES and FedLoan the same? AES and FedLoan Servicing are two different companies that are owned by PHEAA. AES services FFEL Loans and private student loans. FedLoan Servicing stopped servicing federal student loans in 2022 and transferred its accounts, including the Public Service Loan Forgiveness portfolio, to other servicers. AES continues to service FFEL and private student loans.

Are AES student loans federal or private?

AES services federal student loans made under the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL) and private student loans for various entities, including:

Coronado Student Loan Trust
Goal Financial
Key Bank
National Collegiate Student Loan Trust (NCT)
ALPLN Loan Type

Loans made under the FFEL Program were often made by private lenders like SunTrust Bank or PNC Bank. Although the loans were made by banks and not the Department of Education, those loans are federal student loans.

Related: SunTrust Student Loans

If you’re wondering whether your AES student loans are federal or private, the best way to find out is to check your account with the Federal Student Aid website, studentaid.gov. Once logged in, you’ll be able to see every federal student loan you borrowed. Compare that list against your loans with AES. Any student loan listed on AES but not studentaid.gov is a private student loan.

Related: AES NCT Loans on Credit Report

AES Federal Student Loan Abbreviations

STFFRD: Subsidized Stafford
UNSTSD: Unsubsidized Stafford
CNSLDN: Consolidation
SUBCNS: Subsidized Consolidation
UNCNS: Unsubsidized Consolidation
CUBSPC: Subsidized Spousal Consolidation
UNSTC: Unsubsidized Spousal Consolidation
STCNFL: Regular Spousal Consolidation
SLS: Supplemental Loan for Students
GSL: Guaranteed Student Loan

Borrowers most often ask about two codes that are not on this list: UALP and ALPLN. Neither one is a federal loan type. The federal loans AES services are the FFEL types above — subsidized and unsubsidized Stafford, consolidation, and the older guaranteed and supplemental programs. A code outside that set is AES’s own internal label for a private, non-federal education loan, which carries none of the federal repayment plans, forgiveness programs, or discharge rights.

AES doesn’t publish a key to these codes, so the letters themselves are a dead end. Two places give you a real answer instead: your promissory note names the actual loan program, and studentaid.gov lists every federal loan you have ever borrowed. Any loan AES bills you for that doesn’t appear on studentaid.gov is private.

What American Education Services can help you do:

In addition to maintaining your online account where you can request tax forms, loan balance payoff letters, and billing and interest statements, AES can help you explore repayment options, including:

Lowering monthly payments on federal student loans by placing you in the FFEL version of income-based repayment, and on private student loans by offering you a temporary interest rate reduction. Income-contingent repayment is a Direct Loan plan and is not available on FFEL loans.
Qualifying for student loan forgiveness under various programs provided by the federal government, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, Teacher Loan Forgiveness, and student loan discharge due to total and permanent disability and death.
Removing a co-signer after making consecutive qualifying student loan payments and the primary borrower demonstrating they have a good credit score and income.
Temporarily pausing payments with deferments and forbearances.

What American Education Services cannot help you do:

Consolidate student loans. The consolidation process turns FFEL and Perkins Loans into a Direct Consolidation Loan owned by the Department of Education. You can consolidate your loans for free at studentaid.gov.
Negotiate student loan settlements. Unfortunately, AES won’t waive any of the interest that’s been added to your account or agree to settle your student loan debt for the original loan amount or less if you pay the loan balance in full today. You have to default on student loans before you can negotiate a settlement. When you default, your account will be moved from AES to a collection agency. At that point, you should be able to negotiate a settlement.
Refinance loans for a lower interest rate. If you have a good income and a blemish-free credit report, student loan refinancing may allow you to get a new loan with a more extended repayment period, better loan terms, and a lower interest rate. Plus, some private lenders are allowing you to refinance and maintain many of the federal benefits you would lose if you refinance federal student loans.

AES Student Loan Forgiveness Programs

Do AES loans qualify for loan forgiveness? The federal student loans serviced by AES may be eligible for the following student loan forgiveness programs:

Closed School Discharge: wipes out the balances for student loan borrowers who attended a school that closed while they were in attendance or shortly after they left.
Income-driven repayment: promises to discharge your remaining debt at the end of your plan’s repayment term — 20 or 25 years under income-based repayment depending on when you first borrowed, or 30 years under the Repayment Assistance Plan. FFEL loans generally have to be consolidated into a Direct Consolidation Loan to reach these plans — but a consolidation disbursed on or after July 1, 2026 can only use the Repayment Assistance Plan, not IBR (34 CFR § 685.209(d)(5)).
Public Service Loan Forgiveness: forgives the balance owed on Direct Loans if you work full-time for a government or nonprofit entity and make 120 qualifying payments. If you have federal loans with AES, you will need to consolidate them into a Direct Consolidation Loan to qualify for PSLF. Public service loan forgiveness credit does carry through that consolidation — the department applies a weighted average of the qualifying payments you made beforehand. Ordinary income-driven forgiveness credit does not carry across. A consolidation disbursed on or after July 1, 2026 can’t be repaid under IBR, PAYE, or ICR (34 CFR § 685.209(d)(5)), so it lands on the Repayment Assistance Plan — and RAP’s clock has no way to receive the months you earned before consolidating. The one-time account adjustment that credited past payments closed to new consolidations on June 30, 2024 and has been fully processed.
Teacher Loan Forgiveness: allows teachers at qualifying low-income schools to eliminate up to $17,500 of federal student loan debt for math, science, and special education teachers, or up to $5,000 for other teachers, after five complete and consecutive years.
Total and Permanent Disability: cancels your entire student loan debt if a medical doctor, or the SSA, VA determine that medical issues prevent you from working.

Can AES student loans be forgiven? The private student loans AES services are not eligible for loan forgiveness. But the federal student loans it servicers can be forgiven under different programs offered by the Department of Education.

Are my loans stuck with AES?

The Department of Education sometimes moves loans from one servicer to another based on performance and contracts. FedLoan Servicing and Navient both exited federal student loan servicing in 2021 and 2022, moving more than 15 million borrowers to new servicers. Those transfers are finished, and they did not always go smoothly.

Here are two things you can do to minimize errors with your account:

Download your payment history from your online account or ask your servicer to mail you a copy.
Update your contact information with your most recent address, phone number, and email address.

You’ll be notified before your loans are moved to or from AES. Despite the changes, your student loan repayment options and forgiveness will remain the same with the new servicer. But the quality of customer service may be different.

If you’re dissatisfied with AESs performance, you can move your loans to a new servicer by consolidating at studentaid.gov.

Federal student loan servicers:

Aidvantage (took over the Department-owned loans Navient used to service)
Edfinancial Services
MOHELA
Nelnet
OSLA
American Education Services — services Federal Family Education Loans only.
Default Resolution Group only handles federal students loans in default.

Learn More: How to Legally Remove Student Loans From Credit Report

Will AES student loans be forgiven?

No blanket federal cancellation has ever reached AES-serviced loans, and none is pending. The one-time cancellation of $10,000 to $20,000 announced in 2022 was blocked by the courts before a single borrower was paid, and the Supreme Court struck it down on June 30, 2023 in Biden v. Nebraska. It never cancelled anyone’s debt.

Even if a program like that returned, it would not reach most AES accounts. The loans AES services are either federal loans owned by a guaranty agency or private loans owned by someone other than the federal government — not loans owned by the U.S. Department of Education, which is what those programs act on.

The forgiveness actually available to AES borrowers runs through the established programs above: public service loan forgiveness, income-driven repayment forgiveness, and total and permanent disability discharge. For the federal loans AES services, reaching most of them means consolidating into a Direct Consolidation Loan first.

How to make payments to AES

Borrowers can access their accounts at AESSuccess.org and make payments online. They can also pay through the mobile app, by phone at 800-233-0557, or by mailing a check or money order payable to American Education Services to:

American Education Services
P.O. Box 65093
Baltimore, MD 21264-5093

Making payments to AES with direct debit and autopay is the easiest and most reliable method to make your payments by the due date. Direct debit creates an automatic withdrawal from your bank account on a specified date each month.

AES Lawsuits

AES’s parent company, PHEAA, has been subject to multiple lawsuits by states for allegedly mismanaging the PSLF program. For instance, in 2019, the New York attorney general sued the company, alleging it failed to properly inform applicants of the PSLF program’s requirements, resulting in a nearly 99% denial rate. PHEAA settled a lawsuit with the Massachusetts attorney general in 2021 that raised much of the same allegations.

FedLoan Servicing did not renew its contract with the Department of Education and wound down its federal servicing operation in 2022. AES has continued to service FFEL and private student loans.

About American Education Services

AES is a student loan servicer for FFEL Loans, which includes Stafford Loans, Unsubsidized Stafford Loans, Federal PLUS Loans, and Federal Consolidation Loans. The FFEL program was discontinued in June 2010 under the Obama administration. However, millions of borrowers have outstanding balances on those loans.

AES is not a government agency. But its parent company, Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, is a quasi-nongovernmental organization. The state of Pennsylvania initially established PHEAA as a state agency. But the company is now run privately and with limited legislative oversight.

In addition to aessuccess.org, AES and PHEAA run You Can Deal With It, a website that helps educate borrowers on their student loan repayment options.