How long until my student loans are forgiven?

RAP is the income-driven repayment plan created by the July 2025 reconciliation law and available from July 1, 2026. Your monthly payment is a percentage of your adjusted gross income on a sliding scale from 1% to 10%, reduced by $50 for each dependant, with a floor of $10 a month. Any remaining balance is forgiven after 360 qualifying payments — 30 years. It is the plan the federal system is consolidating toward: ICR and PAYE end on July 1, 2028, and borrowers who have not chosen another option are moved to RAP.

Because the honest answer is a range unless we know your exact income tier. RAP applies a sliding scale from 1% to 10% of adjusted gross income, and the specific percentage depends on which income band you fall into. We show you the full span your income produces — the floor at 1%, the ceiling at 10% — so you can see the boundaries with certainty rather than a single figure that might be wrong. For the exact banded figure, our sister site Just A Student runs the full tier table with the advanced options this page deliberately leaves out.

Credit for previously made qualifying payments is one of the most consequential details in the whole transition, and it depends on which plan those payments were made under and how your loans were consolidated. This calculator takes the number of qualifying payments you enter and counts forward from there, so it is only as accurate as that figure. Get your official qualifying payment count from your loan servicer or your StudentAid.gov account before relying on any projected date — do not estimate it from memory.

A great deal, all at once. Grad PLUS loans were eliminated for new graduate and professional borrowers. New annual and aggregate borrowing caps took effect. RAP became available. A grandfather provision protects students who were already enrolled in a programme as of June 30, 2026 and had received a Direct Loan for it, preserving prior limits for the lesser of three academic years or the time needed to finish. That creates a genuinely confusing two-track system in which two students in the same classroom can be under different rules.

No, and this is a trap worth knowing about. Parent PLUS loans, and consolidation loans that contain a Parent PLUS loan, are not eligible for RAP. If your balance includes Parent PLUS debt, the timeline this calculator produces does not apply to that portion, and you should confirm your options with your servicer rather than assuming the same forgiveness horizon applies.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness forgives the remaining balance after 120 qualifying payments — ten years — while you work full time for a qualifying government or non-profit employer, which is a third of the RAP horizon. Payments made under RAP do count toward PSLF. The reverse does not hold in general: payments made under one plan do not automatically carry their credit into another plan's forgiveness clock, so switching plans can cost you progress. Check the effect on your specific count before you switch.

Almost certainly, unless it is forgiven through PSLF. The provision that made forgiven student debt tax-free at the federal level expired on December 31, 2025, so a balance discharged under RAP or IBR from 2026 onward is treated as taxable income in the year it is forgiven. PSLF forgiveness is the exception and remains untaxed. Over a 30-year RAP horizon the forgiven amount can be large, so treat your projected forgiveness year as a year with an unusually big tax bill and plan for it well ahead. State tax treatment is decided separately from the federal rule, so check your own state too.