Your Forgiveness Counter Has Been Dark Since April 2025. The Number Is Still There, at This URL.

If you’re paying toward income-driven repayment forgiveness, the page that told you how many qualifying months you’d banked has been switched off for most of the last year and a half.

Your progress didn’t go anywhere. The display did. And the number is still sitting there, about thirty seconds away.

On April 28, 2025 the Education Department pulled the IDR payment counter off StudentAid.gov and put up a line saying your “IDR payment count and payment history are temporarily unavailable.” Litigation over the SAVE plan forced a change in how the counts were shown. The counts themselves were never thrown out. The window you looked at them through got boarded up.

Temporarily. That was nearly sixteen months ago.

The Department’s story has moved a few times since. In December 2025 it told a court it had no plans to bring the tool back. By early 2026 it had reversed itself, and in April 2026 it issued guidance confirming the tracker would return. It’s coming back in phases instead of all at once. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness counter is back for a lot of people. The income-driven counter is slower, and borrowers who got moved off SAVE are near the end of the line.

So stop waiting for it. Log in to StudentAid.gov on a desktop browser, then paste this into the address bar:

studentaid.gov/app/api/nslds/payment-counter/summary

That’s the raw data feed the tracker was built on, and it still answers. You’ll get a wall of unformatted text carrying a qualifyingPaymentCount for each loan and each repayment plan. The VIN Foundation warns that it’s “going to look really ugly as it is not formatted well for viewing.” It’s ugly. It’s also the actual number.

Now screenshot it.

That’s not paranoia, it’s the National Consumer Law Center’s standing advice, and the reasoning is dull and correct: this information has been taken down once already without warning. While you’re logged in, open your Aid Summary, which lists qualifying months in plain text, then open Payment History and capture every page. One dated folder. Done.

Why bother, when the count is supposedly safe? Because safe and correctly displayed on the day you need it are not the same thing. Borrowers chasing PSLF learned that this month when counts fell and some of those rescissions turned out to be deliberate. The ones in a position to argue were the ones holding a record from before.

On IBR? Check the dashboard first. That plan’s counter mostly kept working while everyone else’s went dark.

One thing not to do: don’t consolidate, and don’t switch plans, on the strength of a number you haven’t looked at. Consolidation can change how your prior months are counted. Pull the figure, save the proof, then decide.

Ten years of payments is worth thirty seconds and a screenshot. Our education hub tracks the rest of what’s moving in federal repayment right now.

How Candid Yak makes money. Some of the products we write about pay us if you apply or sign up through our links. That never changes our verdict, our rankings, or the numbers in this article. We call a bad deal a bad deal whether it pays us or not. Some brands shown in our comparison tools are placeholder examples while we finalize partner agreements, and we label them as such.