A Bipartisan Bill Could Save Wasted PSLF Payments. Right Now, the Wrong Repayment Plan Costs You $18,000 and Zero Credit

Nearly 1.5 million PSLF forms got processed between June 2024 and September 2025. About 1 million of them, roughly 70%, didn’t meet the requirements or were canceled by the borrower. That’s not 70% of people having bad luck. Most of the time it’s the same handful of paperwork problems: wrong loan type, wrong employer, or the one that catches the most people off guard, the wrong repayment plan.

A new bill in Congress wants to fix that last one. Here’s what it would do, what it won’t do, and what you need to check today so you’re not five years into a plan that’s earning you zero credit toward forgiveness.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness wipes out your remaining federal student loan balance after you make 120 qualifying monthly payments, ten years, while working full time for a qualifying employer. That’s government at any level (federal, state, local, tribal), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, or certain other nonprofits doing public service work.

Three things have to line up every single month for a payment to count. Your loans have to be Direct Loans (older FFEL or Perkins loans need to be consolidated first). Your employer has to qualify. And your repayment plan has to be one of the ones the program recognizes. That third one is where people quietly lose years of progress without realizing it.

Here’s the part nobody explains clearly enough. Only income-driven plans (IBR, ICR, PAYE, and the new Repayment Assistance Plan, or RAP, which opened July 1, 2026 and is the only income-driven option for loans taken out after that date. SAVE payments you already made still count, but SAVE has been struck down and borrowers are being moved off it) count toward your 120 payments. The standard 10-year plan technically counts too, but it’s pointless for PSLF since your loan would be paid off in full right around the same time forgiveness would hit anyway.

Graduated and Extended repayment plans generally don’t count. The one exception: a month counts if your payment was at least what the 10-year Standard plan would have charged, and on these plans it usually isn’t, since lower payments are the whole point. And those are exactly the plans servicers sometimes default borrowers into, because they lower the initial monthly payment and look more affordable on paper. If nobody catches it, you can make years of on-time payments while employed in public service and still be at zero toward your 120. The newest version of this trap: if your first federal loan was made on or after July 1, 2026 and you didn’t pick a plan, you were likely placed on the Tiered Standard plan, which doesn’t count either.

Run the math on that. Say you were paying $300 a month on an Extended plan for five years because that’s what you were enrolled in when you left school. That’s $18,000 paid. Toward PSLF, it’s likely worth nothing. You’d need to start your 120-payment clock over from scratch on an eligible plan.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Inclusion Act of 2026 (H.R. 10298) was introduced September 4 by Reps. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), with a handful of Democratic cosponsors. It would let Graduated, Extended, and the new Tiered Standard Repayment Plans count, but only toward your first 60 qualifying payments, not all 120. It would also count months spent in administrative forbearance, including the long SAVE forbearance, for borrowers working in public service.

That’s a meaningful but partial fix. It’s aimed squarely at people who got funneled into the wrong plan early on through no fault of their own, giving them a way to salvage some of that time instead of losing it entirely. It would not make Graduated or Extended plans a permanently viable PSLF strategy. You’d still need to be on an income-driven plan (or RAP) for payments 61 through 120.

Foster’s office cites a 97% historical denial rate for PSLF applications as the reason this needs fixing. That figure comes from the program’s rough early years. The real picture has improved a lot since then, thanks largely to a limited waiver that ran through October 2022 and retroactively forgave $52.1 billion for 758,800 borrowers by counting payments that would otherwise have been rejected. Total forgiveness, counting the waiver and Temporary Expanded PSLF, reached $87.6 billion across 1,183,600 borrowers through September 2025, the latest official tally. Progress, but the underlying paperwork trap that created the mess in the first place is still very much alive, which is exactly why this bill exists.

Don’t build your plan around H.R. 10298 passing. A nearly identical bill has been introduced in one form or another since at least 2019 and never made it into law. It has no CBO score, no scheduled vote, and Congress has a well-documented habit of letting these sit. Treat it as something to watch, not something to wait for.

Log into your loan servicer’s website (or your studentaid.gov account) and confirm your current repayment plan by name. If it says Graduated or Extended, that’s your flag. Switch to an income-driven plan or RAP as soon as possible. Every month you stay on an ineligible plan is a payment that isn’t building toward your 120, whether or not this bill ever passes.

Then submit the PSLF form through the PSLF Help Tool at studentaid.gov, ideally once a year. It certifies your employer and your payment count going forward, and it’s the single easiest way to catch a mistake while it’s still fixable instead of finding out at year eight.

One more wrinkle you may have heard about: a Department of Education rule that would have let it disqualify nonprofit employers found to have a “substantial illegal purpose,” language the Department tied to things like supporting terrorism or aiding illegal immigration, never took effect. On June 30, 2026, the day before its start date, federal courts in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts vacated it. The Department could still appeal, so if you work for a nonprofit in a politically sensitive field, keep certifying your employment every year so your record stays current.

If you want a straight answer on where your own PSLF count actually stands, that’s exactly the kind of question Sense AI, the assistant inside the SuperMoney app, is built to answer. Link your student loans, ask it to check your qualifying payment count against your current repayment plan, and it’ll flag right away if you’re sitting on a plan that isn’t earning you any credit at all.