PSLF Payment Counter
Free PSLF payment counter. Track your 120 qualifying Public Service Loan Forgiveness payments and project your forgiven balance. Not an IDR forgiveness tool.
PSLF Payment Counter
Background.
This page is a Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) qualifying-payment counter — not a general student loan forgiveness estimator. That narrowing is deliberate. Income-driven repayment (IDR) plans other than PSLF can also lead to loan forgiveness after 20 or 25 years, but that landscape is in active regulatory and legal flux as of 2026: the SAVE plan, which had offered the most generous income protection of any IDR plan, was blocked in federal litigation and is being wound down; the new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) launched July 1, 2026 with a different structure entirely; PAYE and ICR are both scheduled to close to new enrollment no later than July 1, 2028; and a separate set of PSLF regulatory changes that were set to take effect July 1, 2026 were themselves blocked by federal judges. Given that much simultaneous change, a confident IDR-only forgiveness date or amount cannot be verified from primary sources at this time — rather than guess, this calculator is scoped narrowly to what can be verified with confidence: the PSLF payment count itself.
PSLF has a comparatively stable, well-established core requirement that has not changed: 120 qualifying monthly payments. A payment qualifies when it is made on a Direct Loan (other federal loan types must first be consolidated into a Direct Consolidation Loan to become eligible), under a qualifying repayment plan (an income-driven repayment plan or, in some cases, the standard 10-year plan), while the borrower works full-time — defined as at least 30 hours per week — for a qualifying employer. Qualifying employers include federal, state, local, and tribal government organizations at any level, and 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, along with certain other nonprofits that provide specifically defined qualifying public services. Critically, the 120 qualifying payments do not need to be consecutive — a borrower who changes jobs, takes a break in public-service employment, and later returns keeps every qualifying payment already made; a new employer simply needs to be qualifying, and payments made while working for a non-qualifying employer do not count but do not reset the counter either.
Once a borrower reaches 120 qualifying payments and submits the PSLF form (which also certifies employment), the Department of Education discharges the remaining loan balance. Unlike most other forms of federal student loan cancellation in 2026, PSLF discharge is completely tax-free at the federal level, and this protection does not depend on the temporary tax exclusion Congress created in the American Rescue Plan Act, which expired for discharges after December 31, 2025. PSLF's tax-free treatment comes from a separate, permanent provision of the Internal Revenue Code that Congress has not touched, so it remains unaffected by that expiration — a distinction that has become more important in 2026 precisely because most other forms of student loan forgiveness became taxable cancellation-of-debt income again this year.
Enter your current federal loan balance, how many qualifying payments you have already made (check the official count on your studentaid.gov account, since employer certifications and payment-history reviews sometimes correct a borrower's own informal count), your current monthly payment, and your loan's interest rate. The calculator returns how many qualifying payments remain, your progress as a percentage, a fastest-case month count assuming no gaps, and a projection of the balance that would be forgiven at payment 120 if your current balance and payment level continue on the same trajectory. This last figure is illustrative only: real income-driven payments recalculate annually as your income and family size change, so your actual payment amount, and therefore your actual remaining balance at payment 120, will very likely differ from a straight-line projection. Reviewed on 2026-07-27; confirm your official qualifying-payment count and current program rules directly at studentaid.gov before making decisions based on this page.
What is pslf payment counter?
Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) is a federal program, established by the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, that forgives the remaining balance on a borrower's Direct Loans after 120 qualifying monthly payments made while working full-time for a qualifying public-service employer. It is legally and structurally distinct from forgiveness that can occur under an income-driven repayment (IDR) plan on its own after 20 or 25 years without any public-service employment requirement — this page models PSLF specifically and does not attempt to model IDR-only forgiveness, because that separate landscape has changed substantially in 2026 (the SAVE plan blocked in litigation, the Repayment Assistance Plan launched, and PAYE/ICR scheduled to sunset) in ways that make a confident non-PSLF forgiveness projection currently unverifiable from primary sources. A PSLF-qualifying payment must meet several conditions simultaneously: it must be made on a Direct Loan (Federal Family Education Loans and Perkins Loans do not qualify unless consolidated into a Direct Consolidation Loan first), it must be made under a qualifying repayment plan (generally an income-driven plan, though the standard 10-year plan also counts for the payments made under it), and the borrower must be working full-time, defined as at least 30 hours per week, for a qualifying employer at the time of that payment. Qualifying employers include government organizations at the federal, state, local, or tribal level, and organizations that are tax-exempt under Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3), along with a defined set of other nonprofits providing specific qualifying public services. The 120 payments do not need to be made consecutively; a borrower can change employers, take time away from qualifying public-service work, and return later without losing previously earned qualifying payments.
How to use this calculator.
- Enter your current federal Direct Loan balance.
- Enter the number of qualifying payments you've made so far — confirm this against your official PSLF payment count on studentaid.gov rather than your own informal tally.
- Enter your current monthly payment amount.
- Enter your loan's annual interest rate.
- Read your remaining qualifying payments and progress percentage.
- Read the fastest-case months-to-forgiveness figure, remembering that real timelines can run longer if there are gaps in qualifying employment.
- Read the projected forgiven balance as an illustration only — your real balance at payment 120 depends on your actual future income-driven payment amounts, which are recalculated annually and will not stay level.
The formula.
Reviewed on 2026-07-27 against studentaid.gov's PSLF program description and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's PSLF guidance. The calculator subtracts qualifying payments already made from the fixed statutory requirement of 120 to get the remaining qualifying payments, and expresses payments made as a percentage of 120 for the progress figure. Because the 120-payment requirement does not depend on loan balance, term, or interest rate, remaining payments and progress are pure counting exercises, not amortization results. The projected forgiven balance is the one figure in this calculator that does use amortization math, and it exists purely as an illustration of what balance might remain at payment 120 if the current balance and payment level held constant: it projects the current balance forward through the remaining qualifying payments at the loan's monthly interest rate, and subtracts the same fixed monthly payment for each of those months, using the standard remaining-balance-after-n-payments identity. If the projection reaches zero or below before the 120th payment — meaning the loan would be paid off under a fixed-payment assumption before reaching PSLF eligibility — the result is floored at zero rather than shown as negative. This projection assumes a constant monthly payment, but real income-driven repayment amounts are recalculated at least annually based on updated income and family size, so a borrower's actual future payments, and therefore actual forgiven balance, will generally differ from this straight-line estimate. This calculator does not attempt to project non-PSLF, IDR-only forgiveness (the 20/25-year timelines that exist independently of public-service employment), because the rules governing those timelines are currently in active flux and cannot be verified with confidence at this time.
A worked example.
A public-school teacher has a $45,000 Direct Loan balance, has made 60 certified qualifying PSLF payments so far at $250 a month on a 5.5% interest rate, and plans to continue working full-time for the same qualifying employer. She has 120 minus 60, or 60 qualifying payments remaining, putting her at exactly 50% progress toward forgiveness. Assuming no gaps in qualifying employment, the fastest case is 60 more months — five more years — until she reaches payment 120. Projecting her current $45,000 balance forward through those 60 months at a 5.5% annual rate while continuing to pay $250 a month gives a projected remaining balance of $41,986.46 at the moment of her 120th qualifying payment. That figure would be the amount discharged under PSLF, tax-free at the federal level. If her actual future income-driven payment rises as her salary grows — which is likely, since IDR payments recalculate annually — her real balance at payment 120 would be lower than this straight-line projection, because a higher payment would pay down principal faster than the constant $250 assumed here.
Frequently asked questions.
Why is this page only a PSLF calculator, not a general student loan forgiveness calculator?
Do my 120 PSLF payments need to be consecutive?
What counts as a qualifying employer for PSLF?
Which loans and repayment plans qualify for PSLF?
Is PSLF discharge taxable?
References& sources.
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