President Joe Biden delivers an opening statement during a news conference in the East Room of the White House on January 19, 2022.
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The application for student-loan forgiveness is set to go live in early October.
Once it does, borrowers will have until December 31 to apply for relief.
The administration has maintained that timeframe is sufficient for eligible borrowers to apply.
The application for President Joe Biden’s one-time blanket student-loan forgiveness will close at the end of the year.
In a long-awaited announcement at the end of August, Biden announced up to $20,000 in debt cancellation for federal borrowers making under $125,000 a year. While the relief could be automatic for about eight million borrowers whose income information is readily available to the Education Department — either through a FAFSA form or income-driven repayment plans — the majority of borrowers will have to apply through an online form.
According to an FAQ on studentaid.gov, the application is set to become live in early October and borrowers will have until December 31, 2022, to apply for relief. The department recommends that borrowers apply before November 15 because it will take four to six weeks for the relief to hit borrowers’ accounts, and getting a form in before that date will ensure borrowers have an updated balance before payments resume on January 1, 2023.
It’s unclear what exactly the application will look like, but even before the debt cancellation announcement, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle expressed concerns with how the relief will be rolled out. In June, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar led some of her Democratic colleagues in writing a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona expressing the importance of ensuring “borrowers get relief quickly and aren’t hampered by unnecessary roadblocks and obligations.”
“The American public will depend on your agency’s ability to deliver debt cancellation quickly and efficiently, no matter the effort and resources required,” they wrote.
But the limited time-frame for borrowers to access relief has some advocates concerned. Kyra Taylor, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told NBC News that “rolling the applications out in October doesn’t give people a lot of time,” and she referred to the studentaid.gov website crashing after Biden announced his loan forgiveness.
Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance — a group that represents federal servicers — previously told Insider that given the announcement of relief right before the payment pause was set to expire, it could take “months to operationalize” Biden’s announcement. He later wrote in a letter to Cardona that the debt relief “risks operational disruptions.”
Still, Biden’s administration has not publicly expressed any concerns with the rollout. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a press briefing last week that the department has already enacted targeted student-loan forgiveness, so it’s equipped to do so on a broad-scale.
“This is not the first time. We’ve done this before in this administration,” she said. “So there’s a precedent here. The Department of Education knows how to work this through. And we’re committed to make sure that folks get the information they need.”