SAVE Plan

The SAVE plan is a federal income-driven student loan repayment plan created by a Department of Education rulemaking and known formally in the regulations as the Revised Pay As You Earn plan. 34 CFR 685.209(a) puts the two names together explicitly: the first of the five income-driven plans is "The Revised Pay As You Earn (REPAYE) plan, which may also be referred to as the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan." One plan, two names, and no legal distinction between them.

It is not a plan a borrower can choose today. It was blocked by litigation before it was fully implemented, the Department stopped administering it and has said it will not implement the rule's provisions, and a federal court has since vacated the rule. What is left for borrowers is not a repayment option but two consequences: the treatment of the months spent in the resulting forbearance, and a restriction on moving to Income-Based Repayment.

Four things the Department of Education did, each stated in its own 2026 rulemaking, are what actually settle the plan's status. The Eighth Circuit enjoined the SAVE and REPAYE plan in its entirety on February 18, 2025. Ahead of that, in August 2024, the Department placed borrowers who were enrolled in REPAYE or SAVE into a forbearance. In a settlement entered on October 9, 2025 it committed not to implement any of the SAVE Plan Final Rule provisions, except for periods of deferment and forbearance that are eligible for income-driven plans. And it has stated that periods from August 2024 forward would not count toward Income-Based Repayment forgiveness, because borrowers would have been in a forbearance. Those are facts about what the agency has done rather than characterizations of a court ruling, which is why they are the reliable part of the picture.

On the court order, this page states the date and the action and stops there, deliberately. The Department's own 2026 final rule cites Missouri v. Department, Case No. 4:24-cv-00520-JAR (E.D. Mo. March 10, 2026) as a final order vacating the SAVE rule. The same document describes the reach of that order in two different ways in two different places, so how much of the rule fell is not something a reader can settle from the published sources, and this page does not assert it in either direction. The practical position does not depend on the answer: the plan is not open, and it has not been open since before the order.

The regulation still says the plan is available, and that is not a typographical error. 34 CFR 685.209(c)(2), current in the July 2026 edition, reads: "Through June 30, 2028, a Direct Loan borrower who has not received a Direct Loan on or after July 1, 2026, may repay under the REPAYE plan if the borrower has loans eligible for repayment under the plan." A reader who checks the Code of Federal Regulations will find that sentence, and it is the single biggest reason SAVE keeps appearing on lists of options. Codified text and administered practice have come apart here, and the Department's statement that it will not implement the rule is what governs.

The restriction on Income-Based Repayment is the part that can still cost a borrower money. 34 CFR 685.209(c)(3)(ii) reads: "A borrower who has made 60 or more qualifying repayments under the REPAYE plan on or after July 1, 2024, may not enroll in the IBR plan." There is no waiver, no appeal and no cure written into the paragraph, and Income-Based Repayment is the one legacy income-driven plan that survives the 2028 wind-down. So a borrower whose SAVE history is long enough may find the plan they were expecting to move to closed. Anyone in that position should get their qualifying payment count from their servicer in writing before assuming which plans are open, rather than working it out from their own records.

The date in that paragraph is not arbitrary, and knowing where it comes from is the only way to read the provision. July 1, 2024 is the effective date of the rule that created the SAVE version of the plan, published at 88 FR 43820 on July 10, 2023. So the paragraph is counting repayments made under the plan as the 2023 rule wrote it, from the day those terms took effect. What it does not settle is how a count is assembled for a borrower whom the Department moved into a forbearance in August 2024, roughly a month later, and the regulation supplies no method. That is the reason to obtain the credited figure rather than to reason toward it.

Three separate legal mechanisms are ending three different plans, and they are routinely run together. Pay As You Earn and Income-Contingent Repayment were closed to new enrollment by regulation. The statutory authority those two plans rest on, 20 USC 1087e(e), is repealed effective July 1, 2028, which is the date behind almost every reference to a 2028 deadline. SAVE and REPAYE became unavailable by a different route entirely, through an injunction, a settlement commitment and a vacatur order. Different mechanisms, different dates, and a sentence that treats them as one story will be wrong about at least two of them.

For a borrower who was on the plan, the sequence rather than the formula is what matters, and it runs like this. The rule was published on July 10, 2023 at 88 FR 43820 and took effect on July 1, 2024. Litigation followed, and in August 2024 the Department moved enrolled borrowers into a forbearance, so payments were not required and were not being made. On February 18, 2025 the Eighth Circuit enjoined the plan in its entirety. On October 9, 2025 the Department entered a settlement committing not to implement the rule's provisions, with a carve-out for deferment and forbearance periods that are eligible for income-driven plans. On March 10, 2026 a federal court entered a final order vacating the rule. And separately from all of it, the statutory authority underneath the income-contingent family is repealed effective July 1, 2028.

Two questions follow from that, and only one has a clean answer. The clean one is what to do next: a borrower still sitting in the forbearance needs to select another plan, and what is available depends on when their loans were made. For loans made before July 1, 2026 the surviving income-driven option is Income-Based Repayment, subject to the 60-payment restriction above, alongside the fixed-payment plans. For loans made on or after that date the choice is the Repayment Assistance Plan or the Tiered Standard plan, and only the first of those produces payments that count toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

The unclean question is how the forbearance months are treated. The Department has said in its own rulemaking that periods from August 2024 forward would not count toward Income-Based Repayment forgiveness, because the borrower was in a forbearance. Its settlement commitment, though, carved out deferment and forbearance periods that are eligible for income-driven plans. Those two statements point in different directions for a given month, and the published documents do not resolve it, so a borrower's actual credited count is something to obtain from the servicer and the Department rather than something to infer. This page states neither reading as the rule.

What this page deliberately does not do is set out the payment formula the rule would have applied. Those provisions are not being implemented, so publishing them would describe a plan that does not operate.

Pros

• The plan is a closed question rather than a live decision, which at least simplifies the choice: there is nothing to weigh and nothing to apply for.
• The forbearance that borrowers were placed in required no payments, so it provided real cash-flow relief while it lasted.
• Income-Based Repayment survives the 2028 wind-down and is open to most borrowers with loans made before July 1, 2026, so for many former SAVE enrollees there is a direct successor.

Cons

• Time spent in the forbearance generally produced no progress toward forgiveness, so borrowers who waited for the plan to be restored lost months they cannot recover.
• A borrower with 60 or more qualifying REPAYE payments on or after July 1, 2024 is barred from Income-Based Repayment, with no cure in the regulation.
• The regulation still describes the plan as available, so borrowers and published summaries continue to be misled about whether it is an option.
• How individual forbearance months are credited is not resolved by the published documents, which makes planning around a payment count harder than it should be.