Married student loan borrowers on income-driven repayment (IDRs) appeared to no longer have to worry about the possibility of an increase in the size of their monthly payments, according to Forbes.
The outlet on Wednesday reported the Department of Education Acting Under Secretary James Bergeron said in an revised court filing on Tuesday the agency “expects that by May 10, 2025, servicers will implement the treatment of spousal information for ICR, IBR, and PAYE such that married borrowers filing separate income tax returns or separated from their spouses will have the spouse counted in the family size for the purposes of calculating monthly payment amount under IDR plans.”
That marks a change from the prior version that the Education Department had submitted late last week and could lead to monthly payments for such individuals potentially going down, according to Forbes.
The original version of Bergeron’s filing said that spousal income would be “counted for the purposes of calculating monthly repayment amount under IDR plans,” something that may have made monthly payments bigger due to more significant household income, the outlet reported.
His sworn declaration came as part of a court case between the Department of Education and the American Federation of Teachers.
The group lodged its case after the agency temporarily made the IDR and online loan consolidation applications unavailable in February in response to a federal appeals court’s ruling on the SAVE Plan, Forbes reported. An existing block on the SAVE Plan, which came from the Biden administration, was widened by the appeals court at that time.
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The Department of Education said on its “Federal Student Aid” website that the online IDR application for IBR, PAYE and ICR plans came back online in late March along with the application for online loan consolidation.
“Although the IDR application is now available, loan servicers are still updating their systems in accordance with the court’s actions,” the Department of Education site said. “Servicers will begin processing applications in the near future.”
Bergeron said in the court filing its loan servicers are slated to start back up IDR plan application processing by May 10, according to Forbes.
Approximately 42.7 million people in the U.S. had federal student loans of some kind as of the fourth quarter of the 2024 federal fiscal year, data from the Education Department showed. Those loans amounted to nearly $1.64 trillion.
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