Student Debt Canceled for 804K Longtime Borrowers

“We hear from all borrowers all the time that are frustrated that they’ve been paying for a long time and maybe they haven’t made a lot of progress towards their balance or the fact that they still have a balance at all,” says Betsy Mayotte, president and founder of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors.

Normally, borrowers must be enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan to see forgiveness. This one-time adjustment corrects those past failures in the student loan repayment system and will cancel debt for those who have been paying 20 years on undergraduate debt or 25 years on graduate debt — even if they’ve never enrolled in an IDR plan.

“This sort of is a Hail Mary, once-in-a-lifetime scenario where they’re going to count periods where you weren’t on an income-driven plan in the past, back to July of 1994,” Mayotte says.