CRI Student Loans: Why Your Loans Moved and What to Check Now

If you got a notice that your federal student loans moved to CRI, it is almost certainly real. CRI is Central Research, Inc., one of the companies the U.S. Department of Education pays to service federal loans.

• Your loan was not sold. The Department of Education still owns it. Only the company handling billing changed.

• Your terms did not change. Interest rate, balance, repayment plan, and forgiveness eligibility all carry over.

• Some things do not carry over cleanly. Autopay and account access are the usual trouble spots.

• Three things to check first. Your balance, your repayment plan, and your payment status.

CRI is Central Research, Inc., a company based in Lowell, Arkansas. It was founded in 2002 and has held federal contracts for years. In April 2023 the Department of Education awarded it a federal student loan servicing contract, one of five awarded under an overhaul of the servicing system. That makes it the newest of the companies servicing federal student loans.

A servicer is not a lender. CRI does not own your loans and did not buy them. The Department of Education owns your federal loans and hires servicers to handle billing, process payments, answer questions, and move you between repayment plans. When the Department reassigns an account, the servicer changes and nothing about the debt itself does.

Accounts have moved to CRI from both Nelnet and MOHELA. This is a partial reassignment, not a handoff of either company’s whole portfolio. Nelnet and MOHELA are both still active federal servicers with millions of accounts. If your loans moved and a friend’s did not, that is normal.

CRI and Nelnet are not the same company. They are separate businesses with separate contracts. One detail causes real confusion here: CRI’s correspondence address is a P.O. box in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Nelnet uses a Lincoln correspondence address too. Both companies route mail through the same city, which is worth knowing if the address on your notice looks familiar, but it does not connect the two businesses.

The notice looks government-issued because it is supposed to. Under the Department’s current servicing contracts, servicers are required to use Federal Student Aid branding on borrower-facing websites and communications. That is why CRI’s site sits at cri.studentaid.gov and carries the Federal Student Aid seal, and why the email you received may not look like it came from a private company at all.

The StudentAid.gov dashboard, reached by logging in with your FSA ID, lists every federal loan in your name and the servicer assigned to it. The Federal Student Aid Information Center answers the same question by phone at 800-433-3243. A link inside an email is not independent confirmation of anything; the dashboard is.

CRI worked as a private collection agency for the Department before it became a servicer, collecting on defaulted loans. It does not play that role now. Defaulted federal loans are handled by the Default Resolution Group, not by CRI. If CRI is your servicer, your loans are being handled as loans in repayment.

The transfer moves your account record from one company’s system to another. Your loan terms are not part of what moves.

What stays the same: your interest rate, your principal balance, your loan type, your repayment plan, and your eligibility for forgiveness programs.

What changes: the company that bills you, the website you log in to, your account number, and where you send payments and documents.

What does not carry over reliably: autopay. It is supposed to transfer, but re-enrolling at the new servicer is the only way to be sure a payment does not get missed during the handoff.

What may look wrong temporarily: balances and payment history. The Department of Education says it can take up to 30 business days for your full payment history to appear with a new servicer, and during that window the account can show incomplete history or a balance that does not match what you saw before.

What shows up on your credit report: the old servicer’s tradeline can show as closed while a new one opens. That pattern reflects the transfer rather than a new debt or a paid-off loan, and “account closed due to transfer” is the label it usually carries.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness counts are tracked by the Department of Education, not by your servicer. A qualifying payment count that looks wrong or missing after a transfer is a StudentAid.gov question rather than a CRI question. The count lives there, and so does the route for correcting it.

A repayment plan change puts the loan through redisclosure — the servicer recalculates the payment schedule and issues a new disclosure with an updated monthly amount. A servicer transfer by itself does not change what you owe each month; a change to the plan does.

On the fixed-schedule plans, Standard, Graduated, and Extended, that recalculation works from your current balance and the time left in your repayment term, not from what you were paying before. Because a plan change resets that math, the new monthly payment can come out higher than the old one even when nothing about your balance or interest rate has changed. Income-driven plans work differently: those payments are set by your income and family size, so they change when you recertify rather than when the schedule is recalculated.

The interest rate reduction for auto debit only applies while a loan is in active repayment status. If your loans are placed in an administrative forbearance — which can happen while a servicer works through an account issue — the discount is not applied for that period, because the loans are not in repayment. It resumes when active repayment does.

Related: Why Is My Student Loan In Administrative Forbearance?

A payment amount that arrives without an explanation has a disclosure behind it. That document, which the servicer provides in response to a written request, shows how the figure was calculated.

Three things on the new account show whether the transfer carried over correctly: your balance, your repayment plan, and your payment status. Online access at cri.studentaid.gov opens once the welcome notice arrives.

1. Your balance. The principal and interest CRI shows should match the last statement from your previous servicer. That old statement is easiest to save before the closed account drops out of view.

2. Your repayment plan. The plan listed on the new account is the one your monthly payment gets calculated from. A plan that differs from the one you were on is the detail most likely to change that amount, and correcting it early avoids billing cycles at the wrong figure.

3. Your payment status. The status — in repayment, in forbearance, or in deferment — determines whether payments are due and whether the auto debit reduction applies. A forbearance you did not request is a status worth a written question.

Autopay is the other item. It does not reliably survive a transfer, and re-enrolling at the new servicer is what confirms it. Payments made during the handoff are forwarded, though confirmation numbers are the only proof of them until they appear on the new account.

Autopay matters for a second reason right now. The Department of Education has temporarily increased the interest rate reduction for borrowers enrolled in auto pay from 0.25% to 1%. The higher reduction runs from July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2028. Borrowers already enrolled receive the increase automatically. Borrowers who are not enrolled have until 11:59 p.m. Eastern on September 30, 2026 to sign up for it. This is a Department program covering qualifying Direct Loans across servicers, not a CRI benefit.

If your repayment plan was affected when the SAVE plan ended by court order in March 2026, the plan showing on your account may differ from the one you originally enrolled in. StudentAid.gov and the servicer’s record are both available to compare against each other.

Escalation runs in two steps: a written request to the servicer, then an ombudsman if the servicer does not correct it. Phone calls leave no record; written requests do.

The written request goes to CRI’s correspondence address, P.O. Box 83106, Lincoln, NE 68501-3106, which is also the address CRI designates for qualified written requests. A request that states what is wrong, what the correct information is, and what needs to change — with statements or screenshots attached — is what creates the record. A copy of everything sent is the other half of it.

Documents about deferment, forbearance, repayment plans, or enrollment changes go to a different address, P.O. Box 82539, Lincoln, NE 68501-2539. Discharge, forgiveness, and bankruptcy claims go to P.O. Box 82612, Lincoln, NE 68501-2612. Sending a document to the wrong box slows it down.

If the written request does not resolve it, an ombudsman is the next step. The Federal Student Aid Ombudsman Group handles federal loan disputes, and many states have their own student loan ombudsman with authority the federal office does not have. Which one fits depends on the problem and where you live — how the student loan ombudsman offices work covers what each office can actually do and how to file.

CRI’s general line is 833-355-4311, open Monday 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern, Tuesday and Wednesday until 8 p.m., and Thursday and Friday until 6 p.m. A separate line serves military borrowers at 833-355-4306. The phone answers questions; writing is what creates a record of them.