Your PSLF Count Dropped. Screenshot It Before You Do Anything Else.

Update, August 20, 2026: This story changed on August 18. The Education Department confirmed it rescinded some PSLF credit on purpose. A spokesperson said Federal Student Aid found “multiple PSLF counter code errors stemming from changes implemented in May 2024 under the Biden Administration,” and named the Limited PSLF Waiver and the One-Time IDR Account Adjustment, the two programs that handed borrowers credit for months that would not otherwise have counted. The department says it has “resolved the issue and already notified the vast majority of affected borrowers of updates to their payment counts.” It declined to say how many borrowers lost credit, whether any legitimate payments were stripped by mistake, or whether what was taken comes back. Read the rest of this post with that correction in mind: a drop in your count is no longer safe to assume is a glitch. The instructions below matter more now, not less.

If you’re chasing Public Service Loan Forgiveness and your qualifying payment count fell this month, you need to know which kind of drop you got: the broken-database kind, or the kind the Education Department did on purpose. It has now admitted to both and won’t say who got which. Screenshot your tracker today.

Borrowers started reporting the drops in early August. One went from 103 qualifying payments to 88 after submitting a routine employment certification, with months that had counted for years suddenly flipped to ineligible. Another made their 120th payment in July, the finish line, and watched the tracker fall to 99. Some received a formal notice with the heading “Qualifying Payment Reduction Notice.”

Then a banner appeared on StudentAid.gov dashboards: “The number for your PSLF qualifying months of employment is incorrect. We are working to fix the data issue and will provide an update soon. We apologize for the confusion caused by this error.”

Federal Student Aid’s call center is saying the same thing to anyone who calls. It’s a data error. The payments still qualify. A fix is coming. What nobody at the department has said is how many borrowers are affected, what caused it, or when the numbers come back.

For most of August that reassurance was the whole story, and it looked like a system failure rather than a policy change. On August 18 the department said part of it was deliberate: some credit was pulled back to correct coding errors it traced to the Biden-era waiver programs. The program itself still works the way it did in July, 120 qualifying payments over ten years of full-time work for a government or nonprofit employer, on Direct Loans. What’s in question is whether the months you already banked stay banked.

Now notice the pattern around it. This is the third significant data problem in roughly a month. MOHELA sent past-due notices to borrowers who owed nothing, some warning of default. Weeks before that, the department told income-driven repayment applicants to reapply because their monthly payments had been calculated wrong.

The Student Debt Crisis Center called this one a “catastrophic system failure” and, with other advocacy groups, is asking for a pause on payments and interest until the system can be trusted. Nobody in the administration has taken that up.

When the only system holding proof of your ten years can’t count to 120 on a good day, you keep your own copy. Call it filing.

Do this today, whether or not your number moved.

Download your full payment history from StudentAid.gov. Screenshot the month-by-month breakdown on the PSLF tracker, not just the headline total, because the total is what a fix will overwrite and the month-by-month is what proves which specific payments were marked good. Save every employment certification approval and every repayment plan letter into one dated folder.

Keep paying. A missed payment while you wait on a fix is a real problem, not a data problem, and nothing about this glitch pauses your bill.

Keep certifying, too. Some drops showed up right after a routine certification, but the department hasn’t named a cause and a gap in your certifications is something you’ll have to rebuild later. Screenshot first. Then submit.

If your count dropped, call your congressional representative’s office and ask for casework help. Constituent services staff can push a stuck federal file in a way a call center queue cannot.

Our education hub covers how the repayment plans compare, and the student loan calculator will run your timeline if a plan change is also on your list this year.

The department may still fix most of this. Have your own numbers ready for the part it decides not to.

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