Don’t count on keeping that $50 monthly student-loan payment.
An Education Department spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that some student-loan borrowers who submitted online income-driven repayment applications were told they would receive an incorrect monthly payment of $50.
The error affected borrowers who shared their federal tax information with Federal Student Aid, the spokesperson said, and did not comment on the total number of borrowers who received the incorrect payment amount.
The issue has been resolved, and borrowers are expected to see accurate payments on FSA as early as this week, the spokesperson said, adding that servicers will email affected borrowers and that borrowers do not need to reapply for a repayment plan.
This comes just weeks before President Donald Trump’s sweeping student-loan changes will take effect on July 1. Those changes include new borrowing caps and repayment plans, which are expected to increase borrowers’ monthly bills, some by hundreds of dollars.
Business Insider spoke to nine student-loan borrowers who were told they had $50 payments, despite expecting their actual payments to be much higher. They said they had received no official correspondence from their servicer informing them of the error, and some are still waiting to learn what their correct payment is.
Brad Jacobsen, 46, said that he expected his next student-loan payments to be around $1,200. When he went to recertify his income on FSA and saw the new $50 payment amount, he was confident it was a mistake, but he said submitted the application to avoid missing the income recertification deadline.
He’s still waiting to hear from his servicer on his correct payment amount.
“It just feels really in the dark, and it’s hard when you’re trying to budget, and you don’t know when you’re going to be paying it, how much you’re going to be paying,” Jacobsen said.
Eleasha Semple, 27, said she wasn’t expecting to see a $50 payment when she applied for an income-based repayment plan, but she was hopeful that the low payment might have been real. About two weeks after she submitted the application, she received a letter from her servicer: her actual payment was $2,200.
“I was like, ‘$2,000 a month. This is insane,'” Semple said. “Now, I didn’t really believe it was $50, but $50 to $2,000 is such a vast discrepancy that I went into almost a panic.”
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