DELAWARE - Nearly 2,500 Delaware borrowers will receive over $113 million in income-driven student loan forgiveness in the coming weeks. Across the nation, the Biden-Harris Administration has approved 804,000 borrowers for $39 billion in federal student loans for automatic discharge this summer. Eligible borrowers will not have to take any action to receive this income-driven repayment forgiveness.
Income-driven repayment plans set a borrower's monthly student loan payment at an amount intended to be affordable based on that borrower's income and family size. Once a borrower makes 240 or 300 monthly payments, or 20 or 25 years of payments, the plan offers forgiveness of the remaining loan balance. The number of required payments depends on when a borrower first took out the loans, the type of loans they borrowed, and the payment plan in which she is enrolled.
The Department of Education said improvements to the forgiveness program have made it so all borrowers have an accurate count of the number of monthly payments that qualify towards forgiveness. These came after the department said inaccurate counts resulted in borrowers losing progress towards forgiveness.
The department said it has started notifying eligible borrowers about their discharges and that emails from Federal Student Aid inform borrowers that their discharges will start 30 days from the notification date. The emails also explain that borrowers who want to opt out of the discharge for any reason should contact their loan servicer during this period. Borrowers will be notified by their loan servicer after their debt is discharged. Those receiving forgiveness will have repayment on their loans paused until their discharge is processed.
President Joe Biden said in a statement Friday that he plans to continue focusing on student financial aid with a new income-driven repayment plan to cut undergraduate loan payments in half and bring monthly payments to zero for low-income borrowers. This plan came after he said the Supreme Court made the wrong decision.
"I have long said that college should be a ticket to the middle class, not a burden that weighs down on families for decades," Biden said Friday.
He continued on to call out Republicans opposed to student loan forgiveness, calling them hypocrites for accepting business loan relief.
"Republican lawmakers who had no problem with the government forgiving millions of dollars of their own business loans have tried everything they can to stop me from providing relief to hardworking Americans," he said. "Some are even objecting to the actions we announced [Friday], which follow through on relief borrowers were promised but never given, even when they had been making payments for decades. The hypocrisy is stunning, and the disregard for working and middle class families is outrageous."