After more than three years of the COVID-19 payment pause, most federal student loan borrowers were required to start making payments in late 2023. Protections from negative consequences of missed payments were removed in late 2024. In this brief, I use credit bureau data to assess borrowers’ progress making payments in the two years since the end of the payment pause and compare repayment outcomes with those in prepandemic years.

Why This Matters

After more than three years without required payments, getting borrowers engaged with the loan system again is a challenge. And many newer borrowers had no experience with making required payments each month because they took out their first loans during the pause or were still in school, and therefore in deferment, when the pause started. Additionally, the creation of the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) income-driven repayment (IDR) plan and then the plan being held up in court created more confusion for borrowers. These conditions created circumstances that could cause borrowers to struggle making payments and to have difficulty navigating the federal student loan system.

Key Takeaways

• Borrowers are paying down balances more slowly than before the payment pause. At the median, prime-credit borrowers paid down their balances by 14 percent in the two years since the end of the payment pause, compared with 21 percent in the two years leading up to the payment pause.
• Recent delinquency rates have reached prepandemic levels and are likely to continue rising. Twenty-one percent of borrowers have had a recent student loan delinquency, which is the highest delinquency rate since 2017.
• Required payments have increased modestly since 2015 in nominal terms but have decreased in real terms. At the median, payments were $158 in 2015 and $182 in 2025. In 2025 dollars, this is equivalent to a decrease from $215 to $182.
• These findings suggest default rates will spike over the next several months, necessitating policy options for providing smoother pathways out of default, protecting the most vulnerable defaulted borrowers, and preventing future defaults.

How I Did It

I use data from one of the three major credit bureaus from 2015 to 2025 to examine repayment trends. The data include a random sample of all Americans with credit records and are collected in August of each year. These records have the amount of student debt (federal and private combined) a borrower holds, the status of that debt, expected monthly payments, the number of student loan delinquencies in the past 24 months, borrowers’ credit scores, and information on other types of debt.