Save student loan plan ends, leaving millions of US borrowers 90 days to find a new one

Save student loan plan ends, leaving millions of US borrowers 90 days to find a new one

More than 7 million Americans will be forced to change their student loan repayment plan beginning on Wednesday, as the Save plan officially ends. The termination of the Biden-era initiative, which was launched in 2023, coincides with a larger overhaul of the US student loan repayment system.

The seismic changes to the student debt landscape are the results of the Trump administration's One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in 2025 and a March 2026 federal court ruling that the Save plan, an income-driven repayment program created with the goal of cutting undergraduate loans in half, was unconstitutional.

Borrowers on the Save plan will now have 90 days to choose a different repayment plan.

The US Department of Education has said the upcoming overhaul simplifies the student debt system. In a statement earlier this year, Nicholas Kent, the under-secretary of education, said: "For years, borrowers have been caught in a confusing cycle of uncertainty, but the Trump administration's policy is simple: if you take out a loan, you must pay it back."

Financial experts and student borrower advocates have previously expressed major concerns about the changes.

"People are not feeling good," Michele Zampini, associate vice-president of federal policy and advocacy at the Institute for College Access & Success (Ticas), said. "The two things that are top of mind are payment affordability, of course, and the ability to actually enroll and make payments without being embedded in servicing errors."

"A lot of people made enrollment and borrowing decisions based on one repayment system, and are going to leave school into a less generous, more expensive repayment system," said Zampini.

Students are already bracing for the impact of higher debt, and for some, it's causing them to rethink their future plans.