In 2025, during President Donald Trump's second term, federal student loan borrowers experienced significant changes in their repayment plans. The alterations included a hiatus in forgiveness for income-driven repayment plans, an overhaul of the Public Service Student Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, and a revamp of the entire repayment structure. Amid this shifting landscape, approximately 121,000 borrowers still saw their debt being pardoned, a figure lesser than that during Trump's predecessor's tenure, but significantly higher than historical figures.
The burden of repaying student loans weighs heavily on many borrowers' budgets. A sizeable number of them have reduced their spending to meet their repayment obligations, and they depend upon loan forgiveness programs to allocate their funds to other responsibilities, like savings or family care. In 2025, the Department of Education forgave loans for around 117,280 borrowers via the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, a scheme that pardons public service workers' loans after a decade of repayments.
The total student loan forgiveness granted in 2025 was computed using public data from the Department of Education and court filings related to two cases involving the federal student loan program.
As a point of comparison, during former President Joe Biden's tenure, an average of 267,500 borrowers’ loans were pardoned each year under PSLF, with a sum total of roughly 1.07 million. This was an exceptional level of forgiveness since, before Biden, the program had discharged loans for only about 7,000 borrowers.
The Trump administration in 2025 also forgave loans for approximately 3,570 borrowers through the Income-Based Repayment plan. Three income-oriented repayment plans – the Income-Contingent Repayment, Pay As You Earn, and Income-Based Repayment – allow borrowers to receive forgiveness after a specific number of payments.
For most of 2025, loans were not pardoned under income-driven repayment plans due to a lawsuit challenging their legality. The Department of Education commenced a pause on forgiveness for the ICR and PAYE plans early in 2025 and extended it to the IBR plan in July.
The Department of Education doesn't have public data on the number of borrowers who received forgiveness through an income-driven repayment plan from any administration, but it's known that at least 3,570 borrowers saw their debt pardoned through the IBR plan from November to December 2025. No borrowers have yet received forgiveness through the ICR or PAYE plans.
Before Biden's tenure, just 50 borrowers received forgiveness through an income-driven repayment plan. According to Protect Borrowers, a borrowers advocacy organization, about 1.04 million borrowers had their loans pardoned through income-driven plans during the Biden administration, averaging nearly 260,000 annually.
In comparison to this, the Trump administration pardoned less than 1.4% of that average in 2025.