Navient to MOHELA: Who Has Your Student Loans Now

MOHELA services the student loans Navient used to service. The handoff finished on October 21, 2024, and it was not a merger or a sale.

• There were two handoffs, three years apart. Government-owned Direct Loans left Navient in 2021. Everything Navient owned itself left in 2024.

• The loan itself did not change. Same balance, rate, account number, phone number, and repayment plan.

• Your loan type decides what comes next. FFEL, Direct, and private loans have different forgiveness paths.

• Navient’s name can still appear on your credit report, and on a private loan that defaulted.

MOHELA has the loans Navient owned itself, and Aidvantage has the Direct Loans the federal government owns. Two separate transfers put them there, three years apart, and who owned the loan decided which one moved yours.

October 2021 — the government’s loans went to Aidvantage. Navient held a servicing contract with the U.S. Department of Education covering roughly 5.6 million borrower accounts. Maximus took over that contract on October 20, 2021 and renamed the operation Aidvantage. These are Direct Loans the federal government owns; the transfer changed the company answering the phone and nothing else.

October 2024 — Navient’s own loans went to MOHELA. Navient also owned a portfolio of its own: private student loans, plus older Federal Family Education Loan Program loans it bought or made before that program ended in 2010. In May 2024 Navient agreed to hand servicing of that entire book to MOHELA, and the transfer took effect on October 21, 2024. Nearly 900 Navient employees moved with it.

Navient describes the second move as covering all of its student loan servicing, with rare exceptions such as defaulted accounts.

StudentAid.gov settles which one applies to you. Your loan breakdown there lists every federal loan the department owns, with its servicer named, and a loan that does not appear on StudentAid.gov at all is private. Telling a federal Navient loan from a private one walks through the rest.

MOHELA and Navient are separate companies and always have been. Navient’s transfer page states that MOHELA is not purchasing or merging with Navient, and MOHELA’s says the same in reverse.

What matters is the difference between owning a loan and servicing it. The owner holds the loan agreement and the right to collect. The owner hires the servicer to send bills, take payments, process forms, and answer questions.

Nothing was sold in either transfer. For the loans that went to Aidvantage, the Department of Education still owns the debt. For the loans that went to MOHELA, Navient still owns them — it hired MOHELA to run the accounts. That differs from the federal side, where the department is both owner and contracting agency, and it is why Navient can still appear as the creditor while MOHELA is the company you deal with.

MOHELA is short for the Higher Education Loan Authority of the State of Missouri, a nonprofit governmental corporation. It services loans on two separate tracks: federal loans under contract with the Department of Education, and Navient’s portfolio as a commercial client. The tracks are unrelated, which matters if you have heard that the department is moving federal accounts off MOHELA — that move covers the federal portfolio, not the loans MOHELA took over from Navient.

Navient and MOHELA ran on the same servicing platform, so the 2024 transfer needed no system conversion and carried most account details across intact.

What stayed the same:

• Your loan terms, interest rate, and any borrower benefits in your loan agreement

• Your account number

• The phone number you call — 888-272-5543 for both FFELP and private accounts

• The addresses for mailing payments and sending documents

• Your user ID and password

• Your auto pay enrollment, which transferred automatically

• Your repayment plan, deferment, or forbearance, with no reapplication required

What changed: the website you log in to, and the company you deal with. Navient’s borrower site now points to servicing.mohela.com, where the same credentials work.

The mailing addresses confuse people most, because MOHELA inherited Navient’s post office boxes and keeps documents separate from payments. For FFELP and HEAL accounts, correspondence and documents go to P.O. Box 9500, Wilkes-Barre, PA 18773-9500, while payments go to P.O. Box 9533. The fax line for documents is 800-848-1949.

A letter from Box 9500 with MOHELA’s name on it is the ordinary case, not a sign that something went wrong. Private-loan accounts use a different set of boxes, which MOHELA lists on its contact page.

Navient still owns the loans MOHELA services, and a defaulted private loan returns to Navient outright. Its name legitimately appears in three places, and none of them means the transfer failed.

You are behind on payments, and MOHELA is calling. MOHELA services the account through delinquency and makes those calls itself, so a call while you are behind is not evidence that anything moved.

Your private loan defaulted. Most private loan agreements treat a loan as in default at about 120 days past due, and once a private loan with Navient defaults, it goes back to Navient. That is where Navient’s name legitimately reappears as the party pursuing the debt, and defaulted private balances can often be settled for less than the full amount depending on your finances.

Navient is still the owner. On documents naming the creditor rather than the servicer, Navient’s name is correct and current.

Navient will not be your federal servicer again. A September 2024 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau order permanently barred it from servicing Direct Loans and from consumer-facing servicing of FFELP loans, and required $100 million in borrower redress plus a $20 million penalty. Navient’s lawsuits and settlements covers the rest. That makes a caller claiming to be Navient about a current federal loan worth checking: StudentAid.gov names the company that actually services it.

After the transfer, the tradeline usually reads HIGHER ED LOAN AUTH OF MO (FORM NAVIENT) — the Higher Education Loan Authority of Missouri, short for “formerly Navient.” Some reports render it as MOHELA, or as Missouri Higher Education. All describe the same account. An unfamiliar Missouri lender on your report is not a new debt and not a sign your loan went to a collector.

A balance that appears twice is a reporting lag, not a second loan. When servicing moves, the old servicer sometimes keeps reporting the balance for a cycle or two after the new one starts, so the same debt appears as two tradelines. It usually clears on its own within a couple of months.

If the duplicate outlasts that, or you are mid-mortgage-application and cannot wait, a doubled student loan balance on a credit report covers how to get it corrected.

The transfer did not change your eligibility for anything. Your loan type sets your options, and for most people who moved from Navient to MOHELA that means FFEL.

FFEL loans cannot reach Public Service Loan Forgiveness while they stay FFEL. PSLF is limited to Direct Loans.

FFEL loans can use Income-Based Repayment, on the older terms. FFEL loans stopped being issued in 2010, and the FFEL Program has a single IBR formula: payments set at 15% of your discretionary income, capped at what you would pay on the 10-year Standard plan, with the remaining balance forgiven after 25 years. The 10% and 20-year version of IBR exists only for Direct Loans. The partial financial hardship test that used to gate enrollment was removed in 2025.

Two kinds of FFEL loan are shut out of IBR entirely. FFEL parent PLUS loans, and FFEL consolidation loans that paid off a parent PLUS loan, are not eligible for IBR at all.

The one-time account adjustment is finished. For a stretch ending in 2024, the Department of Education ran a one-time recount that gave borrowers credit toward forgiveness for past periods that had not previously counted. FFEL borrowers could be included, but only by consolidating into a Direct Consolidation Loan by June 30, 2024. That deadline has passed and processing is complete, so it is not something you can request now.

Consolidating into a Direct Consolidation Loan is still possible, on different terms than before. Consolidating converts FFEL loans into a Direct Loan, which opens PSLF and access to the Repayment Assistance Plan. But a Direct Consolidation Loan made on or after July 1, 2026 cannot be repaid under IBR, PAYE, or ICR — only RAP or the Tiered Standard plan. RAP counts toward PSLF and forgives the balance after 30 years of qualifying payments.

The trade is concrete: you gain PSLF eligibility, and you move from a 25-year IBR forgiveness clock to a 30-year RAP one. A second cost lands if you also hold Direct Loans taken out before July 1, 2026 — consolidating now ends IBR, PAYE, and ICR access across your entire Direct Loan portfolio, not just the new loan. How the FFELP-to-Direct consolidation works covers the application, and the current repayment plans compare the payment formulas. Nelnet made the same kind of split for the commercially held FFEL loans it services, under the Sloan Servicing brand; the consolidate-or-stay analysis is the same.

If your loans went to Aidvantage instead, nothing about your forgiveness progress moved. Direct Loans keep their PSLF and income-driven repayment credit through a servicer change.

Private loans have no federal forgiveness path. The one narrow exception is Navient’s School Misconduct Discharge, which cancels certain private loans taken out to attend for-profit schools with documented misconduct and is now requested through MOHELA. Navient’s private loan forgiveness program covers who qualifies.

Your servicer no longer administers PSLF. The Department of Education moved PSLF and TEACH Grant servicing to StudentAid.gov on May 1, 2024, and MOHELA’s federal contract excludes those programs. PSLF forms and payment counts run through StudentAid.gov regardless of who services your loans.