Nearly 8 million student loan borrowers with $180 billion federal student loans are in default, according to the latest data from the Department of Education.
The number of defaulted borrowers mirrors the count from December 2019, prior to the payment pause, when 7.7 million recipients with approximately $168 billion in federal student loans were in default.
In a March 13 Electronic Announcement, the Department said Federal Student Aid (FSA) posted a series of updates to its data center, the centralized online source for data and other information about FSA programs and operations.
The Department said number of borrowers in default represents 11% of the total $1.61 trillion portfolio as of December 2025.
In addition to the borrowers already in default, the Department said that many borrowers remain at risk of entering default in the coming months. More than four million student loan borrowers (23.2% of the total number of borrowers) are more than 30 days delinquent on their accounts. This includes approximately 1.8 million recipients in late-stage delinquency who are at risk of defaulting in the next six months.
Other key findings in the data include the total outstanding federal student loan portfolio, which is 42.8 million recipients with federal student loans totaling $1.7 trillion. The Direct Loan portfolio is more than 90% of the outstanding loan portfolio, while the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) portfolio represents less than 10%, and Perkins Loans comprise less than one-fifth of one percent.
The federally managed portfolio—which includes FFEL and Perkins Program loans owned by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and Direct Loans—is now more than $1.61 trillion, representing more than 95% of the total portfolio.
As of December 2025, more than 17.2 million Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) forms were submitted for the 2025–26 school year, and nearly 5.8 million forms were submitted for the 2026–27 school year. This represents a 6% increase in AY 2025–26 applications submitted compared to the same period in the previous cycle and a 78% increase in 2026–27 forms compared to the number of forms that were submitted by the end of December in the prior cycle.
Disbursement data for the 2024–25 award year which ended June 30, 2025, shows that students received $39 billion in Federal Pell Grants and $88.1 billion in Direct Loans, which represents a 24% increase in Pell Grant disbursements and a 4% increase in Direct Loan disbursements from the same period for award year 2023–24.
