The U.S. Department of Education announced on Wednesday that it will make a fully functional Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, available by December 1, following a two-month “phased rollout,” during which the agency will make the form available to a limited number of colleges and students. That testing phase, the department said, will enable it to identify and resolve any technical issues before the application is open to all users.
The announcement follows months of speculation about when the form would go live for the next round of federal-aid applicants — and whether the system would be free of major problems at that point. Typically, the FAFSA becomes available on October 1. But after the calamitous rollout of the 2024-25 FAFSA, many financial-aid officers and college-access advocates have said that the application must be fully functional, even if its arrival is delayed by a couple months. “We are wrestling with the trade-off between timeliness and functionality,” five associations wrote in a July 23 letter to the department, “and have concluded that the consequences of releasing a product that does not come with full end-to-end functionality for students, families, state agencies, and aid administrators would be too great.”
In a call with reporters on Wednesday, Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona said the department was acting on such feedback. “Our stakeholders were crystal clear: They overwhelmingly preferred the department have a December 1 launch date of a FAFSA form they can have full confidence in. They want to know that when students submit their applications, their forms will be processed quickly and that their data will be accurately sent to schools within days.”
The department plans to invite “volunteers” to participate in the testing, which starts on October 1. It will make the FAFSA available to hundreds of students at that time, and then expand access to tens of thousands in early November. “Like all software testing, this will surface bugs and issues that we will be able to address before the application is open to the full public,” Jeremy Singer, FAFSA executive adviser in the Federal Student Aid office, said on Wednesday. “This extended testing period will enable us to ensure that the FAFSA is as stable and as user friendly as possible.”
Singer emphasized that the testing process would involve real data. “These tests will be run on software in production with actual students and contributors,” he said. “It will pull actual IRS data. It will generate real [Institutional Student Information Records] that will be adjusted by actual colleges.” Students who submit a FAFSA during the testing phase will not need to resubmit it later.
The fact that we are still, to this day, dealing with the aftershocks of this year’s FAFSA rollout shows just how imperative it is that the process is thoroughly tested from end to end and launched as a system, not in a piecemeal manner.
The department did not share specific information about how it will enlist colleges and students in the testing phase. Singer said that the agency would provide more details in the coming weeks: “We’ll partner closely with schools, colleges, and college-bound organizations to support students and families throughout the various testing cycles.” A senior official with the department said later that the process would include a “broad swath” of students.
Though the department said in its announcement that the 2025-26 FAFSA will have “full functionality,” including back-end processing, when it opens in December, a senior official confirmed on Wednesday that one key function would not be available by then — “batch corrections.”
That’s the term for the process allowing colleges to submit corrections to students’ FAFSA records in bulk, which saves financial-aid offices from the tedious and time-consuming task of entering them manually for each aid applicant. On July 30, the department announced that colleges would not be able to submit batch corrections for the current aid cycle, which frustrated many financial-aid officials who are still slogging through problems caused by numerous delays in the federal-aid process this year.
The department did not say when batch corrections would be available in the 2025-26 cycle — a reminder that FAFSA repairs could continue into next winter, at least.
“The fact that we are still, to this day, dealing with the aftershocks of this year’s FAFSA rollout shows just how imperative it is that the process is thoroughly tested from end to end and launched as a system, not in a piecemeal manner,” Beth Maglione, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said in a written statement.
Maglione said that she was encouraged by the department communicating about its FAFSA timeline in advance. But not so much by the news about batch corrections.
“As we move forward,” she said, “we hope that ED will maintain a high level of transparency — particularly around issues that would directly impact the ability of financial-aid professionals to serve students, such as a functional batch-corrections process. We also hope this two-month planned-testing period will allow for a much smoother rollout.”
But after a year of delays and missed deadlines by the department, it would be hard to blame financial-aid officers for expressing some skepticism about whether the agency will deliver.
On Wednesday, Samantha Hicks, assistant vice president for financial aid and scholarships at Coastal Carolina University, posted a reaction to the announcement on X: “I believe nothing they say.”
