PSLF Buyback Program: How It Works and How to Apply

PSLF Buyback lets you pay for deferment and forbearance months so they count toward the 120 qualifying payments Public Service Loan Forgiveness requires. It requires 120 months of certified qualifying employment. As of October 2026, buyback is still available. The regulation remains in effect, but changes in March and July 2026 raised the price of SAVE-era months and closed buyback for months under the newest repayment plans.

PSLF requires 120 qualifying monthly payments while working full-time for a qualifying employer. For years, many borrowers who met the employment requirement fell short on payment counts because their servicers steered them into forbearance or deferment instead of income-driven repayment.

PSLF Buyback fixes that gap. The Department of Education created it in a November 2022 final rule, codified at 34 CFR § 685.219(g)(6) and effective July 1, 2023. You pay what you would have owed on a qualifying repayment plan, and the bought-back months count toward your 120. If that brings you to 120, your remaining balance is forgiven. The rule was called “hold harmless” while it was being drafted.

PSLF Buyback is not going away as of October 2026. The buyback regulation is still in effect, and the department is still accepting and deciding requests. The changes behind October 2026’s news coverage took effect earlier in the year:

• March 31, 2026: SAVE months priced differently. SAVE payment amounts no longer set the buyback price. If you were enrolled in SAVE on or after July 18, 2024, the plan you were in before SAVE informs the amount. For many borrowers buying back SAVE forbearance months, the price went up.

• July 1, 2026: Repayment Assistance Plan and Tiered Standard months excluded. The regulation now excludes months repaid under the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP), and the department’s guidance, updated over the summer, also excludes the Tiered Standard Plan. A borrower whose first loan or consolidation is dated on or after July 1, 2026 has only those two plans, so buyback is effectively closed to that borrower.

• Summer 2026: loan servicers brought in. The Washington Post reported in October 2026 that the department had turned to loan servicers for help processing buyback requests, and that some ran into coding errors. Your buyback agreement may now come from your servicer instead of the department.

• May 2026: the last court-filed backlog figure. The department’s final court report put pending requests at roughly 88,000 as of April 30, 2026. In October 2026 it told The Washington Post that about 82,000 were pending. Neither figure is current enough to estimate a wait; our PSLF buyback timeline tracks the numbers.

Buyback could still change. PSLF itself is a statute, and ending it would take an act of Congress. Buyback is a regulation, so the department could narrow or end it through rulemaking without Congress. As of October 2026 it has not proposed to. Borrower advocates argue that the 2026 narrowing and the processing delays are weakening the program in practice. The department says it remains committed to crediting qualifying payments.

Related: Is PSLF Going Away? PSLF Changes in 2026

You must meet three requirements:

1. You have Direct Loans with a remaining balance. FFEL and Perkins loans don’t qualify unless you consolidate them into a Direct Consolidation Loan first. Loans that are already paid in full, forgiven, or discharged can’t be bought back.

2. You have 120 months of approved qualifying employment. This means your employment has already been certified and approved on studentaid.gov. Buyback doesn’t create employment credit — it converts non-payment months into qualifying payment months. You don’t have to still be working for a qualifying employer: the Department’s position is that you can participate as long as you were employed during the month associated with your 120th payment and your loan still has a positive balance. FSA also describes the program as being for borrowers with no plans to certify any additional qualifying employment, so buyback is a finishing step rather than a way to keep a count moving.

3. You have months in deferment or forbearance that overlap with your qualifying employment. These are the months you’re buying back.

How far back you can reach. If you never consolidated, buyback reaches months starting in October 2007, when PSLF was created. If you have a Direct Consolidation Loan, it reaches back only as far as the later of October 2007 or the earliest disbursement date of that consolidation loan. Anything before that date is outside the program regardless of what you were doing at the time.

Months You Cannot Buy Back

Not every non-payment month qualifies. You cannot buy back months when your loans were in:

• In-school or in-origination status

• Grace period

• Default

• Bankruptcy

• Total and permanent disability (TPD) monitoring

• Any month you were repaying under the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) or the Tiered Standard Plan

The key distinction: buyback covers deferment and forbearance. It does not cover default, bankruptcy, or the other statuses listed above. Months repaid under the Repayment Assistance Plan are excluded by the regulation itself, which opens with that carve-out. Months repaid under the Tiered Standard Plan are excluded as well — that exclusion comes from the department’s own guidance rather than the regulation’s text, and follows from the Tiered Standard Plan not being a qualifying repayment plan for PSLF in the first place.

If You Consolidated — or Are Thinking About It

Consolidation and buyback pull in opposite directions, and this catches people who are trying to do everything right.

You can only buy back months on the consolidation loan itself. The department is explicit about this: once loans are folded into a Direct Consolidation Loan, you can’t buy back months from the loans that went into it, or any period before that consolidation loan’s first disbursement. Those months are gone for buyback purposes even if you were working in public service the whole time.

That makes consolidating and buying back competing routes, not complementary ones. Consolidating carries a weighted average of your prior qualifying payments onto the new loan, and for someone holding FFEL or Perkins loans it’s the only way those loans earn PSLF credit at all. But it simultaneously closes the door on buying back the deferment and forbearance months sitting on those older loans.

Two things decide which way it falls. The first is where the weighted average leaves you relative to 120 payments — you can model that with our PSLF weighted-average count calculator. The second is how much time you have left in qualifying employment, because months you can still earn the ordinary way are months you don’t need to buy. Someone three years from retirement and someone ten years into a career reach different answers from the same loan file.

If you already consolidated, this isn’t a decision anymore — it’s just the boundary of what you can request.

Related: PSLF Weighted Average Consolidation Rules

Your buyback amount is based on what you would have paid on a qualifying income-driven repayment plan. The calculation depends on how long your forbearance or deferment lasted and whether you were on an IDR plan before or after.

Forbearance or Deferment Under 12 Months

If you were on an IDR plan before or after a forbearance that lasted fewer than 12 months, FSA uses this calculation:

1. Identify your monthly IDR payment immediately before the forbearance began.

2. Identify your monthly IDR payment immediately after the forbearance ended.

3. Use the lower of the two amounts as your monthly buyback rate.

4. Multiply by the number of months being bought back.

Example: Your IDR payment was $150/month before forbearance and $175/month after. You were in forbearance for 6 months. Your buyback cost: $150 × 6 = $900.

Forbearance or Deferment 12 Months or Longer

For longer gaps, FSA requires documentation to recalculate what your IDR payment would have been:

• Tax returns for each calendar year covered by the forbearance

• A signed statement of your family size

FSA recalculates your hypothetical IDR payment for each year. If the forbearance spanned multiple calendar years, the monthly amount may differ across years.

The 30-day deadline matters. When FSA requests this documentation, you have 30 days to submit it. If you miss that deadline, FSA defaults your buyback calculation to the 10-year Standard Repayment Plan amount — which is almost always higher than the IDR-based amount.

$0 Buyback

If your income during the deferment or forbearance period would have qualified you for a $0 payment on an IDR plan, your buyback costs nothing. This is written directly into the regulation at 34 CFR § 685.219(g)(6)(ii) — it’s not discretionary.

You qualify for $0 buyback when your adjusted gross income during those months fell below the poverty level threshold used by your IDR plan. You can estimate your own amount with our PSLF buyback calculator.

The 10-Year Standard Plan Cap

Regardless of the calculation method, your buyback amount per month is capped at the 10-year Standard Repayment Plan payment. This cap protects borrowers whose income-based calculation would otherwise exceed the standard amount — typically higher-income borrowers with smaller loan balances.

The SAVE Formula Change (March 2026)

As of March 31, 2026, the Department of Education changed how buyback is calculated for borrowers who were on the SAVE plan. Previously, FSA used the SAVE plan’s payment formula — which produced lower monthly amounts because SAVE used a higher income exemption (225% of the federal poverty level vs. 150% for IBR and PAYE).

Under the new policy, SAVE payment amounts can no longer be used for buyback calculations. What replaces them depends on your history. If you were enrolled in SAVE on or after July 18, 2024, the department looks back to the income-driven plan you were in immediately before you enrolled in SAVE, and uses that plan to inform the payment amount. If you weren’t on an income-driven plan before or after the months you’re buying back, the department instead requests your income information and bases the amount on the lowest income-driven payment you would have been eligible for at the time. For many borrowers, either route makes buyback more expensive than the SAVE-based calculation would have been.

Example of the impact: A borrower whose SAVE-based buyback would have cost $4,300 may now owe $12,800 under IBR. The difference comes entirely from the formula change — not from any change in the borrower’s income or loan balance.

The department describes which plan’s formula applies, but not how it arrives at a particular borrower’s number, and the March 2026 change wasn’t accompanied by a Federal Register notice or an electronic announcement. Much of what circulates about the amounts people actually owe comes from borrowers comparing offer letters. Treat any specific figure you see as an estimate until you have your own letter.

If you were on SAVE before the plan was blocked by litigation in mid-2024 and placed into administrative forbearance, those months are eligible for buyback — but the cost is now calculated as if you had been on a different IDR plan.

Related: PSLF Buyback Timeline: How Long Does It Take | Will My SAVE Months Still Count Toward Forgiveness?

There’s no separate buyback application. You request it through the PSLF reconsideration process on studentaid.gov.

1. Certify all qualifying employment. Make sure every period of qualifying employment is reflected in your studentaid.gov account. Submit a PSLF form (formerly the Employment Certification Form) for any uncertified periods. Your account needs to show 120+ months of approved qualifying employment.

2. Submit a PSLF reconsideration form. Go to studentaid.gov and select the PSLF reconsideration option. Choose “PSLF Buyback” as the reason for your request.

3. Respond to any documentation requests within 30 days. If FSA needs income documentation to calculate your buyback amount, submit tax returns and family size statements promptly. The consequences of missing this deadline are explained above.

4. Receive your PSLF Buyback Agreement. As of October 2026, either the department or your loan servicer sends the agreement, which states the total buyback amount. Review the amount carefully — it should reflect IDR-based calculations, not the Standard Plan amount (unless your income was high enough to produce that result).

5. Pay within 90 days. Your servicer must receive the full buyback payment within 90 days of the date on the agreement. You can make more than one payment inside that window as long as the full amount arrives in time. If it doesn’t, the agreement is void and you start the process over.
   Once payment is processed, those months are added to your qualifying payment count. If that brings you to 120 or more, your remaining balance is forgiven.

What voids an agreement after you get one. The department lists several things that cancel a buyback agreement once it’s been sent: submitting a new PSLF form, paying the loan off, or applying to consolidate after the agreement goes out, as well as the loan being discharged or forgiven in the meantime. If an agreement is voided, payments you’ve already made toward it aren’t refunded — they’re credited to your loans as ordinary payments instead.

Related: PSLF Reconsideration: How to Fix a Denied PSLF Application

Decisions take months, which makes the months in between their own decision.

Filing doesn’t lock anything in. Submitting a request doesn’t change your repayment plan, doesn’t stop your payment count from advancing, and doesn’t commit you to paying the amount that eventually comes back. The offer letter is where you decide.

Keep making your payments. As of October 2026, FSA says you must continue making payments until the review is complete and buyback is approved. Those payments still count toward PSLF on their own terms, so they aren’t wasted — and if they carry you past 120 qualifying payments, the amount above the threshold on Direct Loans can be refunded. There is no forbearance designed for borrowers waiting on a buyback decision, and months in a general forbearance do not count toward PSLF.

Leaving public service doesn’t close the door. Buyback doesn’t require you to be working for a qualifying employer when you request it, so a borrower who has already left can still file. What changes is the arithmetic — without qualifying employment you’re no longer accumulating months the ordinary way, so the request is doing all the work.

How long the wait runs is its own question, and the department has declined to give an estimate. We track what the filings actually show on our PSLF buyback timeline page.

Related: How Does a PSLF Overpayment Refund Work?

The Department of Education decides buyback requests. You file one through PSLF Reconsideration on StudentAid.gov, not with your servicer. As of October 2026, FSA says either the department or your servicer will send your buyback agreement or a denial, and you pay the agreement amount to your servicer.

Where questions go depends on your servicer. For questions about a buyback agreement, FSA directs borrowers whose loans are serviced by CRI, EdFinancial, Maximus/Aidvantage, or Nelnet to that servicer. Borrowers serviced by MOHELA contact FSA directly at 1-888-303-7818. MOHELA’s own site says the department, not MOHELA, manages PSLF.

You can’t check the status of a pending request. The department says it can’t provide status on a pending buyback request and will respond by email when its review is done. It has not published a processing time.

Related: Can PSLF Be Reversed?