The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was designed to provide loan forgiveness for student loan borrowers who worked in public service for 10 years and made all of their qualifying payments during that time.
But with mandatory forgiveness due to court cases in which borrowers were unable to make those payments, the PSLF buyback program emerged. It allowed borrowers to retroactively make a lump sum payment to cover the months they weren’t allowed to make their normal payment. Sounds good, right?
Sadly, more than 74,000 student loan borrowers are now trapped in limbo waiting on the Department of Education to simply process their request. These are borrowers who want to make a lump sum payment to finish their requirements on their loans – but even the government cannot process their applications to do so timely.
The Department of Education reported in a court filing yesterday that it processed 5,600 buyback requests in August 2025, the highest monthly total to date. But the backlog of applications waiting to be processed climbed to a record 74,510. This is in additional to the massive IDR application processing backlog.
With a small team processing these requests, wait times for applicants has exceeded 10 months, but new applicants fear it could take a year or more.
What Is The PSLF Buyback Program?
The PSLF Buyback Program was created to allow eligible borrowers to “buy back” time in deferment of forbearance when they would have normally been making payments. While there are many periods of deferment that can count, most borrowers today are buying back time from the SAVE Forbearance.
Multiple court rulings blocked President Biden’s SAVE student loan repayment plan in 2024, and borrowers who were enrolled in the plan were forced into administrative forbearance in July 2024. This meant that even if a borrower wanted to make student loan payments, they wouldn’t qualify for PLSF since no legal monthly payment was due.
The Buyback Program allows borrowers to apply to “buy back’” these months once they hit 120 months of qualifying public service employment. Their application goes to the Department of Education, who then calculates a lump sum payment that would cover all the months of eligible forbearance.
For example, if a borrower applied today, they could buyback all the time from July 2024 through August 2025. That would be 13 months of payments. Assuming their payments were $300 per month, the borrower would have to make a lump sum payment of $3,900 to “buy back” the 13 months of forbearance.
The program has generally been viewed as a win-win. Borrowers receive the forgiveness they were entitled to under law, and the government recoups months of “missing” student loan payments in a lump sum.
The problem is that this program was designed to be an exception, not the rule. But the SAVE forbearance has made nearly 7 million borrowers potentially eligible, and the small team at the Department of Education has been unable to keep up with the volume of requests.
Should Borrowers Wait For Buyback Or Switch To IBR?
PSLF Buyback isn’t the only path towards student loan forgiveness. Borrowers working towards Public Service Loan Forgiveness can also do it the normal path – by resuming qualifying payments on an active repayment plan like IBR.
Given that the SAVE forbearance has only been roughly a year, and buyback requests are also taking roughly a year, it may be more effective to simply switch to IBR and resume making “normal” student loan payments that qualify for PSLF.
Most PSLF buyback requests will be calculated using the REPAYE student loan payment amount – which is effectively the same payment most borrowers would be making under PAYE and IBR today anyway. The result is that the math for most borrowers would be the same, whether they buyback or resume payments.
There are some exceptions – such as those that may only be eligible for pre-2014 IBR, or those who’s incomes have changed significantly.
New Restrictions On Multiple Buyback Requests
The Department of Education recently introduced a pop-up window on the PSLF Buyback Request Form discouraging borrowers from submitting multiple requests. The move is intended to stop duplicate filings from clogging the pipeline.
The Department of Education has mentioned on multiple occasions that multiple requests for the same individual can slow processing for everyone, and won’t necessary improve the processing speed for that person.
However, many borrowers have feared their applications won’t be processed, since many have submitted requests from 2024 that still haven’t been processed.
The lack of clarity surrounding the buyback request process (and it’s related delays) has created confusion for borrowers.
Looking Ahead
For borrowers looking at PSLF buyback to finalize their student loan forgiveness, the writing is on the wall: expect delays. Without additional resources, the Department of Education will struggle to clear the PSLF buyback backlog timeline.
Current wait times already exceed 10 months, and the backlog has only been growing larger. While this month’s processing improvement is a positive sign, even processing 5,400 applications per month would take almost 14 months to clear the current backlog, presuming that no new applications are created.
Borrowers deciding whether to buyback months in forbearance or simply resume payments may find a faster track towards forgiveness by simply going for PSLF “the old fashion way” and making normal monthly eligible payments.