I’ve had autopay with mohela for a long time. I haven’t had issues with it, but I’m getting very close to 120 payments (wayyyy over that in employment months… and I’m one of the July-October? Glitch people.) I also just had to recertify PAYE. That’s still in process, and with everything so glitchy with the recertifications, people getting locked to wrong payments or payment plans, and general issues with autopay I’ve seen, I’ve been seeing advice to turn off autopay.

I’m wondering what the best, most reliable manual method to pay is? I figure the main options are the below, but if someone does something else that works… let me know.

Mainly wondering if anyone has been totally fine with or
alternatively had trouble with payments being marked late or not going through, using either of the below, and what the general advice is:

1) paying via mohela’s site manually. Entering bank info there, then once payment is fully posted/ marked as received and complete on their site, logging back in and removing bank info each month.

Or

2) having your bank (I have chase) push the payment to mohela via bill pay.

Thanks for the help and advice. This has been a very long 10+ years.

I will have 120 qualifying payments next week.

My progress tracker is stuck on 117.

I’d love any advice to make final forgiveness happen as quickly as possible. Please and thank you very much.

A couple of things:

1. I’d love to go into forbearance to spare the monthly payment and any problem getting paid back for over payment, but if it will make the process of forgiveness quicker, I’ll keep paying.

Any advice?

1. Id like to leave my current, pslf eligible employment asap. Any advice on how to do that?

2. Has anyone been able to quickly have their progress tracker updated?

3. Anything else that anyone advises?

I truly appreciate everyone’s advice on this. As we all have experienced, this is an extremely stressful process and having any information makes it a ton easier.

Thanks!!!

Hi All—

my tracker is showing 119 qualifying payments (September and October not showing up) by my backdoor data is showing two more eligible payments which are not showing up on the tracker under "payments needing certification." (The backdoor data was finally updated yesterday just after 9 am.) Is there any point in certifying my employment now, or should I wait until those payments show up on "payments needing certification"?

I’m curious if anyone who is past their 90 day deadline to switch from SAVE has actually been placed into standard repayment plan yet, or are you guys all getting 30 days additional notice at this point?

My 90 day deadline is approaching, and the plan is to wait for 30 day notice, but I’m a little worried, and am curious about other people’s experience.

For those stuck in this supposed tracker glitch purgatory like me where I’m missing July and August (though paid and processed on Mohela), I received a notice from mohela saying I need to re-certify my IDR plan by 11/30/26. October was my 120th payment, processed on Mohela, but not updated on FSA. Any suggestions?

I genuinely have no idea how this process works in the slightest, especially with the payment plans changing. Someone told me to consolidate my loans before I start to repay? How do I make sure they count towards PSLF? I just really do not want to mess this up. I already have to worry about the bar exam post grad lol.

For anyone dealing with the missing PSLF payment counts or prolonged processing issues, another resource to help bring attention to the issue is the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC), a nonprofit focused on student loan borrower advocacy. I have no affiliation with them, but someone else in another comment shared the link and I thought another way to get the word out

They have a public contact page here: https://protectborrowers.org/contact/

I can't speak to whether they'll be able to help with individual cases, but I thought it was worth sharing for borrowers to share their experience and get the word out about this mess.

Really hoping that this is the maintenance that fixes our nebulously promised Thursday "resolution". Along with my other fellow borrowers on this subreddit, I anxiously await some tangible fix. I don't think I can handle yet another goal post being moved for me.

What does an official transition notice look like from Mohela? How do I know when the 90 day clock to switch payment plans has started?

this is insane. I just got off save a few weeks ago and applied for forbearance. I got an email today from mohela saying that forbearance will take 90 buiness days , or 4 months. I cant afford 4 months of payments , mine jump to almost $5k/month . I am trying to buyback 4 months. I submitted buyback in 12/11/24. This is insane

I couldn’t move off the confirm your information page to my dashboard while logging in via Chrome and Safari. I asked to chat they were like you can’t access the website with Apple products as they’re known to have glitches. This has never happened to me before and they present no remedy or tech fix. How are people able to submit their PSLF forms, I don’t have another device?

Hi All,

My time to switch off SAVE is coming up soon (last day to do this is Oct. 27 for me):

• Servicer: MOHELA
• Buyback Request: Late-November 2024
• PSLF Current Counts: 115/120
• Need to buyback: 5 more (July 2024 - November 2024)
• Old Plan: REPAYE -> auto-switched to SAVE
• Loans from 2008-2014 (undergrad and grad school)
• Consolidated various loans into two sub and unsub loans back in late 2022 (to take advantage of the limited PSLF waiver from the Biden admin)

Questions:

• Should I make the official change one week before Oct 27? Which is next Tuesday, Oct 20 to give DoE/MOHELA time to fully process my app?
• Which new repayment plan should I choose? IBR? RAP? Standard? I think all three count for PSLF credit if/when I start making payments again?
• Should I request a general forbearance once I am approved on a new plan (in hopes for the buyback to process soon)?
  
• If I decide to make payments, do I need to submit a recertification of my income? My income grew a lot during the pandemic era.
• How does a ECF come into play? Does that invalidate the buyback request? Say if I make 5 additional payments in the near future, and submit an ECF right after, would that be an issue?
• Other helpful thoughts or feedback?

Thanks in advance!

Someone on here said Thursday would be the day FSA fixes the tracker. Anyone else hear this from FSA? Of course I don’t believe it but maybe there is a glimmer of hope that I’m holding on to.

Hey! Like lots of people, I am a July 120er stuck in 119 purgatory. I've made two additional payments and I've submitted ECFs after each payment. I'm now at 122/120 payments and obviously no tracker update since June. My NSLDS data shows me at 122 qualified/eligible payments for each of my PSLF loans. I want to apply for forbearance while waiting.

Has anyone done this with EdFinancial? Is it an easy process? Did you ask for personal, general, or processing forbearance?

Any help or advice would be great!

I finally hit 10 years of qualifying employment, submitted a fresh ECF (and it's been processed/accepted), and went to submit my buyback request, only to see this message:

Ineligible for PSLF Buyback You're not eligible to submit a buyback request as you're currently enrolled in the Repayment Assistance Plan.

To be clear, I'm trying to buyback the months from when I was forced into forebearance for being on SAVE. I found some posts where it was rumored enrolling in RAP might make you ineligible for buyback, but no confirmation (and mostly people disagreeing that it would work that way). Has anyone successfully applied for buyback after enrolling in RAP?

hello! i am trying to get more organized in tracking my buyback request/general forbearance time frames.

i submitted my buyback request in march 2025 and am struggling to remember the details of the process. ive just been in set it and forget it mode.

i cannot figure out how to speak to a human and keep being told that there's no way to check the status and that as long as i got an email confirmation, im still in line to be processed.

this led me to panic bc i cannot find an email with the words "buyback". the email i found from the day i submitted it states, "Thank you for submitting a Public Service Loan Forgiveness Reconsideration request." this is it, right?? can anyone who submitted for buyback in early 2025 confirm for me that this was the verbiage being used at the time?

i would also love any feedback on how to verify with a human that my application remains active.

i know it's taking forever and im fine to patiently wait - i just want to know that im actually still in the disorderly application pool.

thanks!!

Has anyone been able to apply for buyback even without their July -Sept payments showing?

I plan to apply for buyback in December but I’m just wondering if I will be able to do that if those months don’t show.

My NDLDS says I have 118 PSLF payments. The student loan visual tracker says I am at 119 payments. In reality I am at 120 because they are missing August. Anyone else in this boat?

It seems for most people NSLDS shows a higher count than the direct student loan website.

Should I be worried and want the NSLDS to show 120 before I stop making payments? Or if the green bar hits 120 Should that be safe enough?

Under PSLF- eligible payment count is how many payments studentaid.gov is reporting (and matches the tracker, but eligible payment count is how many payments I made that should be counted when I submit my ecf...right?

Hi friends, I'm hoping to get some advice about what to do regarding a buyback request and (possibly) going into a general forbearance. I apologize in advance if this is well-trodden territory in this sub.
Here is my situation:
studentaid.gov is showing 112 qualifying payments, and my last 3 payments for August, September, and October were made normally through Mohela but FSA hasn't recorded them yet.
So I will be at 115 qualifying payments when/if FSA updates them (how big of an "if" is this?)

There are 5 months where I went into forbearance in 2024 when my payments were turned back on and I just had some inertia getting it sorted out to start paying again (these months are June, July, August, September, and November of 2024).

I have now gotten to 120 months of certified full-time qualifying employment since I started PSLF repayment. And from what I understand I should be able to do a buyback for those 5 months, put myself on general forbearance so I don't have to make anymore payments, pay whatever that amount would have been for the 5 months in 2024 when I was previously on forbearance to Dept of Ed, and put this whole nightmare to rest.

A major major reason I want to do this is because my IDR PAYE plan that I just recertified is over tripling my monthly payments. These increased payments are going to hurt so badly that I am going to have to start making the tough decisions of "do I want groceries or utilities?" this winter.
I am really frugal, but simply house poor and don't have anymore wiggle room, so I feel like I simply can't make these increased payments. But having these student loans hang over my head is really wearing on me and I would do anything to make them go away.

I submitted my buyback request yesterday, but honestly I am scared that if I go into a forbearance and stop paying that something is going to go wrong and I will be on the hook for monthly payments of god-only-knows how much at some random point years down the road.
Representatives at FSA and Mohela are all over the place with thier advice, and, at best, equivocate or just tell me I can always just keep making payments until I feel better about it.
I would love some advice from y'all because my fellow PSLF borrowers on this sub seem to be the only people who live in reality when it comes to PSLF

Thank you, and I appreciate you all!

Hi all. Thank you for your time and patience. I am currently 40 months into my PSLF journey. I have to choose a new payment plan by Nov 15. Can anyone give me advice as to what is cheapest i make roughly 75 K a year as a teacher. I know the PAYE system is ending in 2028. Is it worth it to switch to that or switch right to the RAP program. Any help will be appreciated i feel so embarrassed having no idea what to do.

TL;DR- if you have MOHELA and you are past 121 waiting for the tracker to update, call MOHELA and ask for a processing forbearance, not a general forbearance. Submitting a forbearance with an ECF is not enough if you're affected by the delay glitch. ---EDITED TO ADD: This is what I was told, I think other folks have been told otherwise but what I do know is a processing forbearance seems like the safest way to buy some time.

Hi all -My July/Aug/Sept payments were # 119/120/121 and of course are not updating on the FSA tracker (although they have updated on the backdoor NSLDS). I submitted an ECF at the end of September and requested a forbearance with that ECF. As of today 10/15 that signed ECF is still processing. In October my payment amount went up about 4x and I decided I was absolutely not going to pay that 122nd payment (due this upcoming Monday).

Today I called MOHELA, sat on hold for about 80 min (estimated 45min, what a lie) and explained the situation, requesting forbearance. Tammy told me "I'm going to put you in a processing forbearance, because any other kind including a general will stop FSA from being able to update and you'll have more delays." It is a 60 day processing forbearance, and if it's not updated by about 50 days (early December) I was told to call back. and IF/WHEN the tracker is updated and it shows 120, call MOHELA back to shift to a General Forbearance, as "this pauses everything - approximated due dates, payment counts, etc". My online MOHELA account already reflects the forbearance, too.

The fact that I had submitted a forbearance request through FSA with my ECF did NOT make a difference - this may go into effect automatically once FSA processes it, but if you're in the same boat, do not wait on it.

Hope this helps someone - hang in there yall!

My time has come and I am finally being forced out of SAVE.

I am looking at my options and i think there my be an error on the calculator?

Both the Standard Repayment Plan and the Extended Fixed Repayment Plan say the estimated payment would be $453. I'm not sure how those could possibly be the same?

IBR is estimated at $696 per month and ICR is at $705 per month, and yet both of these allegedly have a lower total amount paid.

So I'm a little confused by these calculations.

I only have 16 payments left. So if I truly can just make all those payments at $453 and then apply for PSLF, that would be great! But something feels off and I'm not sure that's actually the case?

Any advice anyone has would be greatly appreciated.

I am one of many folks that submitted a buyback offer December 2024. I needed to buyback 7 months. It will be two years December 2026 since I submitted this request. Thankfully, I took myself off of SAVE and started repayment June 2026. So December will make my 120th payment.

I submitted a case to FSA and said, if there is anyone with a heart on the other end of this case, please process my buyback request. Yes, I did in fact say these words. The response is so disheartening, per usual, but I still wanted to share.

__________________________________________________________________________

Dear xxxxxxxx,

Thank you for contacting the U.S. Department of Education's office of Federal Student Aid. This message is in reference to your inquiry about buybacks. Your case number is xxxxxxxx. Retain this number for reference.

After reviewing your account, we located a Buyback request. Buyback's have been updated to "no timeframe", meaning the cases can take as long as they need to process. Since yours is still here and pending, you will have to allow it time to process. Once the account is process you will get an email advising your next steps.

If you need more help or have any questions, reply to this email or contact us.

Sincerely,

Federal Student Aid

I've read about some suboptimal experiences people have had with PAYE recertification recently, so I thought I'd share my own to hopefully ease some nerves and maybe learn from my prior mistake.

I switched to PAYE following the SAVE injunction. Last year when I got my first recertification 90 day notice I submitted recertification documentation electronically right away. They were reviewed and approved within 2 days and my new payment amount started the following month meaning my prior payment amount was only in effect for 9 months. This directly contradicts the guidance in those very forms saying recertification would be held so that "borrowers could take advantage of the full 12 months of their income based repayment plan". I've read here about others being similarly misled.

Because this year my salary has increased, I wanted to keep my current payment amount for as long as possible so I waited until the day before the recertification deadline to electronically submit the forms via studentaid.gov. I got notice from Mohela 2 days later that they had recieved the recertification request and 5 days after that got notice from Mohela that my IDR plan request was approved. My new payment amount will start next month- still 1 month sooner than it should be, but ultimately better than the 3 months I was cut short last year.

Best of luck to everyone running their own repayment marathons and keep the faith!