General Student Loan Forbearance and Hardship Requests

General forbearance on a federal student loan lets you temporarily stop payments, reduce them, or push back the due date when you’re going through a short-term financial hardship. You request it from your loan servicer using the General Forbearance Request form, and if approved it covers up to 12 months at a time. It’s discretionary, meaning the servicer decides whether your situation qualifies, and interest keeps accruing the whole time on every loan type you have, including subsidized loans.¹

Who Qualifies

The request form lists four hardship categories you can check:

Financial difficulties, where your income isn’t enough to cover both living expenses and loan payments.
A change in employment, such as job loss, reduced hours, or a career transition that cuts your household income.
Medical expenses large enough to make loan payments unmanageable.
Other circumstances that don’t fit the categories above, which you explain in your own words.¹

The operative word is “temporary.” Your servicer weighs whether the hardship is a short-term disruption you’ll recover from or a permanent change in your circumstances. A request the servicer views as either not serious enough or too permanent can be denied. That discretion is what separates general forbearance from the mandatory forbearances a servicer must grant when you meet defined criteria.

How to Request It

Pull Your Documentation First

Before you contact your servicer, gather the records that show your hardship. Recent pay stubs or your most recent tax return establish current income. A list of your monthly expenses and other debts shows the gap you’re trying to close. Vague or thin applications are the easiest ones to deny, so make the shortfall between what you earn and what you owe concrete.

Fill Out the Form

The General Forbearance Request form is on the Federal Student Aid website and in most servicer portals. You’ll check one hardship category, state how long you need forbearance (up to 12 months), enter your financial details, and sign. Missing signatures and blank fields are the most common reasons forms come back.¹

Submit and Keep Paying

Most servicers accept the form and supporting documents through their secure online portal. Mail and fax still work. Keep copies of everything, including confirmation receipts. Processing runs from a few days to a few weeks depending on the servicer’s volume.

Keep making your scheduled payments while the request is pending if you can. If you stop paying and the request is denied, those missed payments show as delinquent. Some servicers place accounts in a short administrative forbearance while processing to prevent that, but don’t assume it happens automatically; confirm with your servicer.²

Note that “forbearance” under the federal regulation isn’t only a full pause. It can also mean an extended deadline or your servicer accepting smaller payments than your normal schedule requires.³ Reduced payments limit how much unpaid interest piles up, so if your servicer offers that instead of a full pause, it may be the better outcome.

How Long It Can Last

A single approved request covers up to 12 months. If your hardship continues past that, you submit a new request with updated documentation.¹

The lifetime cap depends on your loan type. Perkins Loans have a three-year cumulative limit set by regulation. Direct Loans and FFEL Program loans have no single regulatory cap; instead, each servicer sets its own limit on how much cumulative general forbearance it will grant. Two borrowers with the same type of Direct Loan but different servicers can have different allowances. Ask your servicer how much forbearance you’ve used and how much remains before assuming you have years of cushion.¹

What Forbearance Actually Costs

Interest accrues on all your federal loans during forbearance, including subsidized loans. That’s the biggest difference between forbearance and deferment, where the government covers interest on Direct Subsidized Loans.⁴

When forbearance ends, unpaid interest is typically added to your principal. That’s called capitalization, and going forward you pay interest on the larger balance. On $30,000 at 5% interest, a 12-month forbearance would add roughly $1,500 in interest to principal, so your future interest then accrues on $31,500 instead of $30,000.⁴

Interest-only payments during forbearance prevent this. Even if you can’t cover the full monthly payment, paying the interest each month keeps your principal from growing. Your servicer can tell you the exact monthly interest amount. It’s the single most effective way to hold down the long-term cost.

Effect on Credit, PSLF, and IDR Forgiveness

Forbearance itself isn’t a missed payment. As long as it’s approved and you’re meeting the servicer’s terms, your account should be reported as current. Delinquencies that happened before forbearance kicked in stay on your credit report; the approval doesn’t erase them retroactively. This is another reason to keep paying while your request is being processed.

Months in general forbearance don’t count as qualifying payments toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness. PSLF requires 120 qualifying monthly payments, and forbearance months produce zero progress. The PSLF Buyback program can partially fix this after the fact: if you have at least 120 months of certified qualifying employment and buying back the forbearance months would bring you to the 120-payment threshold, you can pay for those months. The buyback cost is based on what your payment would have been under an income-driven repayment plan during the forbearance period, or the 10-year standard payment if lower.⁵

Forbearance months also generally don’t count toward the 20- or 25-year forgiveness under income-driven repayment plans. The Department of Education’s payment count adjustment credited certain forbearance periods to IDR forgiveness: borrowers with 12 or more consecutive months in forbearance had those months treated as repayment time, and borrowers with 36 or more cumulative months had all their forbearance time credited. Only forbearance after July 1, 1994, was eligible. Borrowers who believe they were pushed into unnecessary forbearances can file a complaint with Federal Student Aid to have that time reviewed.⁶

Better Options to Consider First

General forbearance is easy to get compared to other relief, which is why servicers sometimes steer borrowers toward it when something better is available.

Economic Hardship Deferment

If you qualify for economic hardship deferment, the government pays the interest on your Direct Subsidized Loans during the deferment period. You may qualify if you’re receiving certain means-tested federal benefits, earning below 150% of the poverty line, or serving in the Peace Corps. If you qualify, deferment is almost always the better choice.⁷

Income-Driven Repayment

If your hardship is really a long-term income problem rather than a short-term disruption, an income-driven repayment plan usually fits better than repeated forbearances. Payments are based on what you earn, and borrowers with income near or below 150% of the poverty line can qualify for payments as low as $0. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has noted that income-driven repayment is generally a better long-term solution than forbearance for borrowers whose income can’t support standard payments.⁴

One thing to know if you were on the SAVE Plan: a federal court blocked it, borrowers enrolled in SAVE were placed into forbearance, and you’ll need to select a new repayment plan. Check with your servicer about your options.⁸

If Your Request Is Denied

Ask the servicer for the specific reason and whether additional documentation would change the outcome. A denial is sometimes just a paperwork problem. Beyond resubmitting, check whether you qualify for a mandatory forbearance, which the servicer cannot refuse if you meet the criteria. Mandatory forbearance covers medical or dental internships and residencies, qualifying AmeriCorps service, National Guard duty, and certain other circumstances defined by regulation.³

If none of those apply, an economic hardship deferment application or a switch to an income-driven plan is usually the next move. Doing nothing is the worst outcome: your loans slide into delinquency and eventually default, which brings wage garnishment and Treasury offset of tax refunds. If your servicer isn’t helping, the Federal Student Aid Ombudsman Group handles complaints about servicer conduct.

1
Federal Student Aid. General Forbearance Request
2
Federal Student Aid. Grace Periods, Deferment, and Forbearance in Detail
3
eCFR. 34 CFR 685.205 – Forbearance
4
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Tips for Paying Off Student Loans More Easily
5
Federal Student Aid. Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Buyback
6
Federal Student Aid. Payment Count Adjustments Toward Income-Driven Repayment and Public Service Loan Forgiveness Programs
7
Federal Student Aid. Loan Deferment
8
Federal Student Aid. IDR Court Actions