Borrower defense to repayment is a federal program that can cancel your student loans if the school you attended lied to you, broke its promises, or otherwise violated the law in connection with your enrollment or borrowing. If your claim succeeds, the U.S. Department of Education can wipe out your remaining balance, refund payments you already made, and remove the loan from your credit report. The application is free, you file it yourself at StudentAid.gov, and no one needs to be paid to help you.
Which Loans Qualify
The program covers William D. Ford Federal Direct Loans: Direct Subsidized, Direct Unsubsidized, and Direct PLUS loans taken out by parents or graduate students.1eCFR. 34 CFR Part 685 – William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program
Older federal loans — Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL) and Federal Perkins Loans — aren’t directly eligible, but you can pull them into the program by consolidating them into a Direct Consolidation Loan first. Once consolidated, you can still base your claim on the misconduct tied to the original loans that were rolled in.2Federal Register. Institutional Eligibility Under the Higher Education Act of 1965, as Amended; Student Assistance General Provisions
Private student loans are not eligible. The school also must have been participating in federal student aid programs at the time the misconduct occurred.
What Counts as School Misconduct
The misconduct has to connect directly to your decision to enroll, stay enrolled, or borrow. A general complaint about bad teaching isn’t enough; you need a specific misrepresentation, omission, or broken promise. The Department decides claims on a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, meaning it needs to be more likely than not that the school’s conduct caused you real harm.3eCFR. 34 CFR Part 685 Subpart D – Borrower Defense to Repayment
The claims that tend to hold up fall into these categories:
- Substantial misrepresentation about things like graduation rates, job placement figures, expected salaries, transferability of credits, or whether the program leads to professional licensure.
- Substantial omission of critical facts — for example, failing to disclose that a program lacked the accreditation needed for graduates to work in the advertised field.
- Breach of contract, where the school didn’t deliver on specific promises in your enrollment agreement, such as clinical placements, equipment, or particular course offerings.
- Aggressive or deceptive recruitment tactics used to push you into enrolling or borrowing.
- A favorable legal judgment already won by you or a government agency against the school on conduct related to your loan or education.3eCFR. 34 CFR Part 685 Subpart D – Borrower Defense to Repayment
How Long You Have to File
The applicable deadline depends on which version of the regulations governs your loan. Under the 2019 rules, borrowers have three years from the date they stopped attending.4eCFR. 34 CFR 685.206 – Borrower Responsibilities and Defenses The 2022 rules removed any time limit for applications filed on or after July 1, 2023. Because the legal framework is actively contested, don’t assume you have unlimited time. Check current guidance at StudentAid.gov and file as soon as you can.
Check for a Group Discharge Before You File
The Department can approve discharges for entire groups of former students when it finds widespread misconduct at a school, based on enforcement actions, lawsuits, patterns in individual claims, or its own sanctions.3eCFR. 34 CFR Part 685 Subpart D – Borrower Defense to Repayment When a group discharge is approved, relief is processed automatically and borrowers usually don’t need to apply.
Schools covered by group discharges include Ashford University, Corinthian Colleges, ITT Technical Institute, DeVry University, the Art Institutes, Westwood College, and Phoenix University, among others.5Federal Student Aid. Borrower Defense Updates Approved group members get full cancellation of their remaining balance plus refunds of payments they already made. The Department keeps an updated list on its borrower defense updates page, so check there first — if your school and enrollment dates are already covered, you may not need to do anything.
How to File an Individual Claim
If your school isn’t covered by a group action, file on your own. The application is free at StudentAid.gov, and you sign in with your federal student aid credentials. To file on paper, download the form and mail it to U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid Information Center, P.O. Box 1854, Monticello, KY 42633.6Federal Student Aid. Borrower Defense to Repayment Application
The application is signed under penalty of perjury and asks for:7eCFR. 34 CFR 685.403 – Individual Process for Borrower Defense
- A description of the specific acts or omissions you’re alleging.
- Who was responsible — the school itself or a specific recruiter, admissions officer, or financial aid staff member.
- Approximate dates the conduct occurred during your enrollment.
- How the school’s conduct influenced your decision to enroll, stay enrolled, or borrow.
- The concrete harm you suffered as a result.
Evidence That Makes a Claim Stronger
The form only requires your written account, but documentation makes a real difference. Useful evidence includes school advertising and promotional materials (especially anything citing graduation rates, placement numbers, or salary figures), emails and letters from admissions or financial aid staff, your enrollment agreement, and screenshots of the school’s website or social media from the time you enrolled. Notes from meetings with recruiters and saved text messages help too.
Specificity wins. “The recruiter told me 90 percent of graduates get jobs within six months, but the actual placement rate was under 30 percent” gives a reviewer something to evaluate. “The school lied about jobs” does not. Upload everything through the online portal, or include copies with a mailed application.
What Happens After You File
You’ll get a confirmation with a case number, and you can track status online. Department staff review your evidence and may contact the school to verify your account. This is slow work. Reviews routinely take many months, and complex cases or high-volume periods have stretched to more than a year.
While your claim is pending, you can request forbearance from your loan servicer to pause monthly payments. Interest generally keeps accruing during forbearance. If your loans are already in default, collection activity can be paused. Neither pause is automatic — you have to ask for it separately from filing your claim.
What Relief Looks Like
An approved claim can result in full discharge of your remaining balance plus a refund of payments you already made on the affected loans. Group discharges processed under the 2023 framework have carried a guarantee of full relief for everyone approved.5Federal Student Aid. Borrower Defense Updates
Under some older frameworks, the Department may grant partial rather than full relief when it decides the harm didn’t justify canceling the whole loan. The bigger the gap between what you were promised and what you actually got, the more relief you’re likely to receive.
When a discharge goes through, the loan’s credit trade lines are deleted from your credit report entirely, not just updated to a zero balance.5Federal Student Aid. Borrower Defense Updates The loan disappears from your credit history rather than sitting there marked paid.
The 2026 Tax Trap
This part catches people off guard. The American Rescue Plan Act excluded student loan discharges from federal taxable income between December 31, 2020, and January 1, 2026.8Federal Student Aid. How Will a Student Loan Payment Count Adjustment Affect My Taxes That window has closed. The permanent exclusions in the tax code cover narrow categories like public service loan forgiveness and discharges for death or disability, and they do not specifically cover borrower defense discharges.9Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 US Code 108 – Income From Discharge of Indebtedness
For discharges processed in 2026 or later, the canceled debt may be treated as taxable income. A $50,000 discharge could show up as $50,000 of income on your return. Servicers are generally required to file Form 1099-C for canceled debts of $600 or more.10Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Forms 1099-A and 1099-C If you were insolvent at the time of discharge (your debts exceeded your assets), you may be able to exclude some or all of the canceled amount. State tax treatment varies: some states track the federal rules, some have their own exclusions, and some tax forgiven student debt even when the federal government doesn’t. Talk to a tax professional before you file for any year a discharge lands on your account.
If Your Claim Is Denied
A denial isn’t final. You can request reconsideration by logging into StudentAid.gov, opening your case in the status center, and choosing the reconsideration option, or by mailing a request to the same P.O. Box used for paper applications. Include your case number, an explanation of why the decision was wrong, and new evidence you didn’t submit the first time. Reconsideration is limited to your original allegations — you can’t add fresh claims about unrelated misconduct.
There’s no formal deadline for reconsideration, but sooner is better while evidence is still available. Before you send anything, consider filing a Privacy Act request for your full case file so you can see exactly what the reviewer looked at and target the gaps.
Closed School Discharge as an Alternative
If your school shut down while you were enrolled or shortly after you withdrew, closed school discharge is a separate program that may be easier to use. It doesn’t require you to prove any misconduct. It requires only that the school closed within the relevant window and that you didn’t finish your program through a teach-out at another institution.
That teach-out point matters. Under some versions of the rules, completing a teach-out after your school closes disqualifies you from closed school discharge. If your school is closing and offering one, think carefully before signing up — a teach-out can eliminate a straightforward path to discharge that doesn’t require you to prove fraud.
Don’t Pay Anyone to File This for You
The application is free and designed for borrowers to complete themselves. Companies charging upfront fees for student loan forgiveness services have been the target of enforcement actions for years, and the Department of Education does not require you to hire anyone. If you want help pulling your evidence together, look for legal aid organizations in your area; many assist student loan borrowers at no cost.