Borrowers pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness are dealing with a fresh snag: payment counts on their dashboards have been temporarily paused because of data issues that are causing the counts to fluctuate. For people who say they have already made their 120th payment, the number that matters most is not moving.
The delay is landing now because the pause affects the final stretch of a program built to erase student debt after 10 years of qualifying payments. Federal Student Aid said the counts are currently static and that updates or correspondence will resume once the issues are fixed, while an Education Department spokesperson said the department remains committed to ensuring every qualifying payment is properly credited.
That promise matters because the pause is not just slowing progress updates. Some borrowers have said qualifying payments were removed from their totals, and the Education Department has linked those removals to Biden-era coding errors. For borrowers who are trying to reach forgiveness or confirm that they already have, a dashboard that can move backward is as damaging as one that stops updating altogether.
The problem also lands against a larger backlog. The Education Department's latest status report said there were 88,000 pending Buyback applications as of April 30, 2026, although the department said some borrowers have filed multiple requests, which inflates the total. The PSLF Buyback program is meant to let borrowers buy back months spent in deferment or forbearance if those months would push them over the relief threshold, but waiting through that process is still waiting.
Borrowers can ask for forbearance if they do not want to keep making payments, but interest still accrues while they wait. That leaves many people with a hard choice: keep paying into a system that is not updating cleanly, or step back and watch the balance grow while they wait for the count to catch up.
Nearly 100 organizations have already urged lawmakers to provide emergency oversight as the repayment changes take hold, warning that borrowers could be harmed by overlapping problems in the federal student loan system. The Education Department says it will resume updates once the data issues are resolved. For borrowers at the edge of forgiveness, the unanswered question is no longer whether the counts are broken. It is how long they will stay frozen.
