Student Loan Repayment Form: Plans, Recertification, and Taxes

The federal student loan repayment form most borrowers are looking for is the Income-Driven Repayment Plan Request at StudentAid.gov, the single application that moves you off the Standard 10-year plan and onto a plan that sets your monthly bill from your income. One form covers all of the income-driven repayment (IDR) plans still open to new enrollees. You can complete it online in about ten minutes if you have your tax information and household details ready, or print it and mail it to your servicer.

Which Plans You Can Request Right Now

Three IDR plans are currently accepting applications. Each calculates your payment as a percentage of discretionary income, which is the gap between your income and a poverty-guideline threshold.

Income-Based Repayment (IBR): 10% of discretionary income with forgiveness after 20 years if you first borrowed after July 1, 2014; 15% with forgiveness after 25 years if you borrowed before that date.
Pay As You Earn (PAYE): 10% of discretionary income with forgiveness after 20 years. IBR and PAYE both use 150% of the federal poverty guideline as the threshold.
Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR): the lesser of 20% of discretionary income or a 12-year fixed payment adjusted for income, with forgiveness after 25 years. ICR uses 100% of the poverty guideline, so payments tend to be higher.¹

The Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, formerly REPAYE, is closed to new enrollees. Borrowers who were on SAVE have been told by their servicers to pick a different plan within a 90-day window or be moved automatically to the Standard Repayment Plan or the new Tiered Standard Plan.² Starting July 1, 2026, two new options open: the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) and the Tiered Standard Plan. Check StudentAid.gov for the current plan list before you file, because the menu is changing.³

For reference, the Standard Repayment Plan splits your balance into fixed payments over 10 years with a $50 monthly minimum.⁴ Switching to IDR almost always lowers the monthly payment, but stretches the repayment period and adds interest over the life of the loan.

What to Gather Before You Start

The form asks for your Social Security number, current mailing address, phone, and email, and those details need to match what your servicer already has on file. Mismatched personal information is one of the most common reasons applications stall.⁵ If you’ve moved or changed your name, update your account first.

The number that drives your payment is your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) from line 11 of Form 1040.⁶ AGI is not your gross salary. It’s total income minus certain deductions like retirement contributions and student loan interest. If you apply online and consent to automatic IRS data sharing, the system pulls your AGI directly, and you can also opt into annual autorecertification through the same consent so you don’t have to refile each year.⁷

Family size shifts the poverty-guideline threshold and therefore your payment. For a single borrower in the contiguous 48 states, 150% of the 2026 poverty guideline is $23,940. Add one dependent and it rises to $32,460. Under the regulation, family size includes you, your spouse if you file jointly, your children who receive more than half their support from you, other people who live with you and receive more than half their support from you, and unborn children expected during the year you certify.¹

Marital status matters too. Under PAYE and IBR, if you and your spouse file taxes jointly, both incomes count; if you file separately, only yours does. Filing separately can lower the loan payment but may cost you other tax benefits, so the tradeoff is worth checking.⁸ ICR includes your spouse’s income regardless of how you file.

When Your Last Tax Return Doesn’t Reflect What You Earn Now

If your income has dropped since you filed, you don’t have to use that old AGI. The form asks whether your income has decreased or your marital status has changed, and answering yes lets you skip the IRS data pull and submit alternative documentation instead: recent pay stubs, a W-2, an employer letter, or bank statements.⁵ Borrowers with no taxable income can submit a signed statement explaining their situation. You can also recertify right after a job loss, pay cut, or divorce rather than waiting for the annual date.

Parent PLUS and FFEL Loans: Consolidate Before July 1, 2026

Parent PLUS loans can’t be enrolled in IDR directly. You have to consolidate them into a Direct Consolidation Loan first, and the only IDR plan available afterward is ICR. There is now a hard deadline: the consolidation must be completed before July 1, 2026, or the loans lose IDR eligibility entirely.²

Older FFEL Program loans that aren’t Parent PLUS also need to be consolidated into a Direct Loan to qualify for modern IDR plans, and the same July 1, 2026 deadline applies. Consolidation applications can take several weeks to process, so start early.

Submitting the Form

The fastest route is the online application at StudentAid.gov/idr. Log in with your FSA ID, choose the plan you want (or let the system recommend the one with the lowest payment), and authorize the IRS data transfer if you want automatic income verification.⁷ The form walks through family size, marital status, and plan selection section by section. You sign electronically, and the confirmation the system generates is your proof of the submission date. Save it.

If you prefer paper, you can print the form, fill it out by hand, and mail it to your servicer, ideally by certified mail. Paper takes longer to process, and you’ll need to include tax documents or alternative income documentation because the IRS data pull is only available online.

What Happens After You Submit

Your servicer checks your financial data against the eligibility rules for the plan you picked. Regulations let servicers place your account into a processing forbearance for up to 60 days while they work through the application.⁹ During that window, you’re not required to make payments, and the time counts toward forgiveness under PSLF and IDR timelines.

Here’s what to watch. If processing runs past 60 days, your account shifts from processing forbearance into general forbearance, which does not count toward forgiveness. Interest continues to accrue during both. If you haven’t heard back within a few weeks, call your servicer and confirm the application is in the queue. If the servicer needs more documentation, respond fast, because delays can push you past the 60-day mark. Once approved, you’ll get a notice with your new monthly payment and its start date.

Recertifying Every Year

Enrolling once isn’t the end of it. You have to recertify income and family size annually, even if nothing has changed.¹⁰ Your servicer will notify you when the date approaches. If you gave consent for automatic IRS data sharing during the initial application, this happens on its own. If you didn’t, you resubmit income documentation each year.

Missing recertification has real consequences. Under PAYE, IBR, and ICR, your monthly payment jumps to what you’d owe on a 10-year standard schedule based on your original loan balance, often hundreds of dollars more per month. Unpaid interest may also capitalize, meaning it’s added to your principal and starts generating its own interest.¹⁰ You can return to income-based payments by filing a new IDR application, but the capitalization doesn’t reverse.

PSLF Uses a Separate Form

If you work for a government or nonprofit employer and are pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness, the IDR application does not cover it. PSLF has its own paperwork, the PSLF Certification and Application, submitted through the PSLF Help Tool at StudentAid.gov/pslf, which searches for your employer, populates the form, and collects electronic signatures from you and your employer.¹¹ Submit it at least once a year and every time you change employers to keep an ongoing record of qualifying payments. Being on an IDR plan is usually a prerequisite for PSLF, so the two work together, but they’re filed and tracked separately.

Taxes When the Balance Is Eventually Forgiven

Something to know for later, not for the form itself: after 20 or 25 years on an IDR plan, any remaining balance is forgiven, and starting in 2026 that forgiveness is taxable. The temporary federal exclusion for forgiven student loan amounts expired on December 31, 2025, so any federal balance forgiven in 2026 or later under an IDR plan is treated as cancellation-of-debt income at your ordinary rate.¹² Your lender sends a Form 1099-C, and you report the forgiven amount on your 1040. If you’re insolvent at the time (total debts exceed total assets), you can exclude some or all of it using IRS Form 982.

PSLF forgiveness, Teacher Loan Forgiveness, and discharges for death or total and permanent disability remain tax-free.¹² So if you finish 120 qualifying payments under PSLF, the discharge at the end doesn’t create a tax bill.

1
eCFR. 34 CFR 685.209 – Income-Driven Repayment Plans
2
U.S. Department of Education. U.S. Department of Education Announces Next Steps for Borrowers Enrolled in Unlawful SAVE Plan
3
Federal Student Aid. IDR Court Actions
4
Federal Student Aid. Standard Repayment Plan
5
U.S. Department of Education. Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) Plan Request
6
Internal Revenue Service. Adjusted Gross Income
7
Federal Student Aid. Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) Plan Request
8
Federal Student Aid. 4 Things to Know About Marriage and Student Loan Debt
9
eCFR. 34 CFR 682.211 – Forbearance
10
MOHELA. Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) Plans
11
Federal Student Aid. Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) and Temporary Expanded PSLF (TEPSLF) Certification and Application
12
Taxpayer Advocate Service. What to Know about Student Loan Forgiveness and Your Taxes