A New Bipartisan Bill Would Let More Repayment Plans Count Toward PSLF. Here Is What It Would Change.

If you work in public service and you are counting down payments toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), the repayment plan you picked matters just as much as your job. Two borrowers with identical jobs, identical loan balances, and identical payment histories can end up in completely different places.

That happens simply because one chose a repayment plan that counts toward PSLF and the other did not. A new bipartisan bill introduced this month would close part of that gap. It has not become law, and it may not for a while, but it is worth understanding now, especially if you are not sure your current plan even qualifies.

The Repayment Plan Problem PSLF Has Always Had

PSLF forgives the remaining balance on Direct Loans after 120 qualifying monthly payments made while working full-time for a qualifying employer, government agencies, nonprofits, and other public service organizations. The catch that trips up far more borrowers than most people realize is that not every federal repayment plan counts toward those 120 payments.

Payments made under an income-driven repayment (IDR) plan currently count. Payments made under the standard 10-year plan count too, though borrowers on Standard rarely have a balance left to forgive by the time they hit 120 payments.

Which plans count toward PSLF today

• Income-Based Repayment (IBR) counts
• Pay As You Earn (PAYE) counts
• Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR) counts
• The Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) counts
• The standard 10-year repayment plan counts
• Graduated Repayment does not count
• Extended Repayment does not count
• Extended Graduated Repayment does not count

Which plans have never counted

What has never counted, going back to when PSLF launched, are payments made under Graduated Repayment or Extended Repayment plans. Those plans were built to lower a borrower's monthly bill by stretching out the loan term, not to move someone toward forgiveness, and the law has always treated them differently.

This is not a small technicality. Extended and Graduated plans have long been offered to borrowers, sometimes by their servicer, as a way to bring down a monthly payment without much explanation of the forgiveness trade-off involved.

A borrower who took that advice years ago and has been making faithful payments the whole time can discover, often only when they are close to the 120-payment mark, that none of those years actually counted.

That exact scenario became national news this summer. As CollegeLens covered in August, the Department of Education spent months correcting what it called PSLF counter code errors, including removing credit for payments made under Extended or Extended Graduated repayment from late 2024 forward, because those months were never PSLF-eligible in the first place.

Borrowers who had that credit removed can pursue a PSLF Reconsideration Request or the separate PSLF Buyback Program to try to recover the lost months. Both routes take time and paperwork, and Buyback sometimes requires a real payment.

How this became national news

1. Late 2024: policy changes affecting how certain repayment periods were coded for PSLF purposes take effect.
2. July 2026: a Department of Education system overhaul uncovers the coding errors that followed.
3. August 2026: ED begins correcting PSLF counts, removing credit for ineligible Extended and Extended Graduated repayment months.
4. September 2026: a bipartisan bill is introduced to change which plans count going forward.

What the New Bill Would Actually Do

On September 4, 2026, Representatives Bill Foster (D-IL) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) introduced the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Inclusion Act of 2026, known as H.R. 10298.

The bill would amend the Higher Education Act so certain payments made by public service employees can count toward PSLF even when they were not made under a plan that currently qualifies.

The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce. It has picked up several additional cosponsors, including Democratic Representative Alma Adams of North Carolina.

Specifically, the bill would allow payments made under Graduated Repayment, Extended Repayment, and the newer Tiered Standard Repayment Plan to count toward a borrower's first 60 qualifying payments, half of the 120 needed for forgiveness.

It is worth being precise about that detail. This is not a blanket rule making every payment under these plans forgiveness-eligible forever.

It applies specifically to the front half of a borrower's PSLF timeline, the period when many borrowers are still learning how the program works and are most likely to have landed on the wrong plan without knowing it.

Several higher education and public-service advocacy groups have voiced support for the bill, including the American Council on Education and the American Federation of Teachers. Their argument is straightforward: PSLF is only useful to public servants if the plans they are actually put on by their servicers count toward it, and right now, many do not.

Why the "97 Percent Denied" Number You Will See Does Not Tell the Full Story

In announcing the bill, Rep. Foster cited a statistic that will likely show up in coverage of this bill: that 97 percent of public servants who applied for loan forgiveness have been denied.

That number traces back to a 2019 Government Accountability Office review of the program's earliest years, when PSLF was new, confusing, and riddled with paperwork and loan-type problems that have since been substantially fixed through consolidation requirements and program overhauls.

The most recent Department of Education data, covering forms submitted between mid-2024 and late 2025, tells a more complicated story. Of forms that were fully processed, roughly 1 in 7 met eligibility requirements outright.

But the leading reason applications were closed or canceled was not an ineligible repayment plan. It was incomplete applications, accounting for nearly three-quarters of closed forms.

Other common reasons included borrowers withdrawing their own request, missing signatures, and employer eligibility problems. Wrong repayment plan showed up on the list too, but it was a smaller slice than the headline "97 percent denied" figure implies.

None of that means the repayment plan gap this bill targets is not real. It is real, and for the specific group of borrowers it affects, being on the wrong plan for years can be devastating. It just means the bill is best understood as fixing one identifiable problem within PSLF, not reversing an entire program in crisis.

The Bill Has Not Passed, and There Is No Timeline for a Vote

H.R. 10298 was introduced and referred to committee. That is the first step in a process that most bills never complete. It has not been scheduled for a committee hearing or a floor vote as of this writing, and nothing about its introduction changes what counts toward PSLF today.

Similar legislation aimed at expanding which payments and plans qualify for PSLF has been introduced in prior sessions of Congress without becoming law. Families should treat this as a bill worth watching rather than a change worth planning around just yet.

If it does eventually pass, an open question worth watching is whether it would apply only to future payments or whether it could also restore credit for past payments made under Graduated or Extended plans. That would be similar to what the PSLF Buyback Program already allows for certain deferment and forbearance periods.

The bill text available so far does not spell that out in plain language, so this is a detail to watch for as the legislation, if it moves at all, works through committee.

What to Do Right Now If You Are on the Wrong Plan

Waiting on Congress is not a strategy. If you are working toward PSLF, the most useful thing you can do today is confirm which repayment plan you are actually on and switch to a qualifying one if you are not.

• Log in to StudentAid.gov and use the PSLF Help Tool to check your employer certification and your qualifying payment count so far.
• Check your loan servicer's account dashboard for your current repayment plan name. If it says Graduated, Extended, or Extended Graduated, those payments are not currently building toward PSLF.
• If you are on a non-qualifying plan, contact your servicer about switching to an income-driven repayment plan, IBR, PAYE, ICR, or RAP, since all four count toward PSLF going forward.
• If you believe past payments were miscounted or removed due to this summer's counter code corrections, look into a PSLF Reconsideration Request before assuming the PSLF Buyback Program is your only option, since Buyback usually involves a cost and Reconsideration does not.
• Keep records of every plan change, including the date and your servicer's confirmation, in case a future dispute over your qualifying payment count comes up.

Who This Bill Would Help Most

The borrowers most exposed to this gap tend to be the ones with the least time to untangle repayment plan rules in the first place. Shift workers, single parents, and people juggling public-service jobs with a second job often accepted whatever plan a servicer representative suggested over the phone years ago.

Most were never given a clear explanation of the forgiveness trade-off involved. A legislative fix that automatically credits certain past plan choices would help exactly the borrowers least equipped to catch the problem on their own.

That is part of why advocacy groups are pushing for it, even though its odds in this Congress are uncertain.

The Bottom Line

A new bipartisan bill, H.R. 10298, would let payments made under Graduated, Extended, and Tiered Standard repayment plans count toward the first 60 of the 120 payments PSLF requires. It was introduced on September 4, 2026, and referred to committee, and it has not passed.

In the meantime, the fastest way to protect your own forgiveness timeline is to confirm your current repayment plan qualifies and switch now if it does not, rather than waiting to see whether Congress acts.

If you want help thinking through how your repayment plan choice affects your family's larger college cost picture, create your free CollegeLens plan to see your options in one place. And if your student has not filed a FAFSA yet, you can file it here as soon as the form opens.

-- Sravani at CollegeLens