Most high school seniors will need to wait until December to be able to use the federal government’s college financial aid form to apply for grants and scholarships, the U.S. Department of Education said.
The Education Department said in an Aug. 7 press call that it will begin testing the 2025–26 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in October, among “a limited set of students and institutions,” before making it available to the general public “on or before” Dec. 1.
This phased approach was taken after a FAFSA cycle riddled with frustrating delays and technical glitches.
Typically, the form is made available in October, and students fill it out for the following academic year. However, the form for the 2024–25 cycle didn’t go live until the end of December last year, almost three months later than what students and colleges were accustomed to.
To comply with a 2020 congressional mandate, the Education Department revamped FAFSA to streamline the lengthy, 108-question student aid form. The new form now has about 50 required questions, a feat mostly accomplished by allowing applicants to import their tax data from the IRS database, removing many of the tax- and finance-related questions.
When families were able to access the new FAFSA, many faced technical glitches and processing errors. In January, the Education Department said that it failed to adjust for inflation when creating the new form and updating the underlying formulas, an error that made $1.8 billion less available in financial aid.
Colleges, as well as many states, rely on FAFSA to determine how much aid they will provide. The Education Department initially promised to transmit FAFSA data to colleges in late January, only to further push the send date to mid-March. That forced millions of students to wait longer for financial aid awards and spend less time weighing their offers.
Federal officials said the second delay in two years will help avoid those problems for the upcoming aid cycle.
During the Aug. 7 call, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told reporters that his department had “listened carefully” to the feedback of students, families, and schools to make “substantial changes” to leadership and operations at Federal Student Aid (FSA), the office that oversees FAFSA.
Jeremy Singer, FSA’s executive adviser for the 2025–26 aid form, promised that “key features will be available on day one.”
“Our team at FSA is still hard at work trying to address the issues from the past year, and we’ve identified areas working with this team that are going to be different as we move into the new year,” Singer said during the call. “In particular, we’ve learned there is a lot that we can do to improve testing.”
According to Singer, the testing period for the 2025–26 FAFSA will begin with hundreds of students on Oct. 1, before expanding to tens of thousands of students in early November. Those applications will be transmitted to colleges.
“This will surface bugs and issues that we will be able to address before the application is open to the full public,” he said.
The decision drew mixed reactions from higher education groups and lawmakers.
Beth Maglione, chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said in a statement that an Oct. 1 debut would be ideal, but it might be better to wait until December to allow time for the necessary testing.
“As we move forward, we hope that [the Education Department] will maintain a high level of transparency—particularly around issues that would directly impact the ability of financial aid professionals to serve students, such as a functional batch corrections process,” Maglione said. “We also hope this two-month planned testing period will allow for a much smoother rollout when the FAFSA is available to all applicants on Dec. 1.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chair of the House Education Committee, accused the Education Department of mismanaging its priorities.
“Ensuring a working, timely, and accurate FAFSA should have been the Biden-Harris administration’s priority from day one,” the congresswoman said in a statement. “Instead, it has continually shown that illegal debt transfer schemes are far more important than ensuring low-income students can afford college.”
The measure awaits floor action in the House.
