If you have federal student loans, your required loan payments may not have resumed in October as originally scheduled. Instead, your loan servicer may have set your payment to $0, and put you in administrative forebearance.

What is administrative forbearance?

Administrative forbearance is a status a servicer may put you in when they can’t get their own act together. With the transition of many loans between servicers this fall, and the change from a $0 loan payment to resuming payments for everyone, some servicers were not able to get their ducks in a row.

Specifically, loan servicer MOHELA was found to be failing to meet its basic servicing requirements of sending out billing statements on a timely basis in September 2023, and therefore the federal government instructed them to not harm borrowers. But MOHELA wasn’t the only servicer who was unable to calculate payments and send bills. This time while the loan servicers get back to functioning counts for these borrowers as time towards loan forgiveness despite paying $0/month, just like they did during the COVID-19 related student loan pause. And you won’t be accruing interest, either.

What does that mean?

In short, if your loan is in administrative forbearance, there is no need to worry, and you get an extension of the student loan pause that existed for everyone from March 13, 2020, to September 1, 2023.

If your loan is not in administrative forbearance, and you are receiving bills, you do need to be paying them.