5 Things You Must Do With Your Student Loans Before Year-End

If you’re one of the nearly 43 million student loan borrowers in the United States, you need to take action on your student loans before the end of the year.
Student loans are easy to ignore – especially since they’ve been in and out of payment pauses and forbearance for nearly five years. But costly mistakes can happen simply because you don’t know what you owe, what repayment plan you’re on, or you miss small details that could save you money.
Here are five things you should do before the end of the year so that you stay on the right track with your student loans.
1. Check Your Student Loan Account
This is critical – you cannot rely on memory with your student loans. Build a routine to check your online student loan account at least monthly. And definitely before you make any decisions.
Start with your Federal student loan portal at [ServicerName].Studentaid.Gov. This will allow you to see your loan types, balances, repayment plans, and monthly payments due.
It will also provide any warnings – such as past due payments. But note: the Department of Education is providing false notices for some borrowers.
If you’re in default, now’s the time to take action because the Department of Education will be offsetting tax refunds this spring as part of renewed collection efforts. You can act now to rehabiliate or consolidate your student loans to get out of default, and avoid future collection activity.
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2. SAVE Borrowers: Understand Your Choices Moving Forward
There are nearly 7.7 million student loan borrowers still in the SAVE student loan forbearance. Last week, the Department of Education announced a settlement to end the lawsuit, and put borrowers on notice – they will be having to change repayment plans soon.
While the timeline is still to be determined, now’s the time to understand your options and make plans to resume payment.
Borrowers in the SAVE forbearance should be running their numbers under the available repayment plan options:
Income-Based Repayment (IBR)
Pay As You Earn (PAYE) – Note this phases out in 2028
Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR) – Note this phases out in 2028
Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) – Note this starts in July 2026
Standard Repayment
Once you know your estimated monthly repayment under the different options available, you can start to make a plan to ensure you’re ready to resume payments.
3. Student Loan Interest Deduction Planning
If you paid any student loan interest in 2025, you might be eligible to claim the student loan interest deduction. This allows you to potentially deduct up to $2,500 in student loan interest you paid this year.
However, you’ll only receive a 1098-E Student Loan Interest Statement if you paid $600 or more in student loan interest. But even if you paid less, it’s still deductible – you just need to know how much you paid.
Login to your loan servicer’s website and print your monthly statements for 2025, and add up all the student loan interest you paid. You can claim this amount as a deduction, regardless of whether you received a 1098-E.
It may not sound like much, but every little bit of savings helps!
4. Borrowers With 300 or More Student Loan Payments
There is a small subset of student loan borrowers who may be eligible for forgiveness, but haven’t taken the action required to ensure it happens (and happens tax-free).
Borrowers in income-driven repayment plans like IBR, PAYE, and ICR are eligible for student loan forgiveness after 240 or 300 payments. Given the timeline of these plans, nobody qualifies for 240 payment forgiveness yet. But there are borrowers who qualify for 300 payment forgiveness.
If you’re in the SAVE forbearance, and have been repaying your student loans from before 2000, you may need to change repayment plans to IBR before the end of the year.
In the latest student loan status report, the Department of Education confirmed its processing IBR-based loan forgiveness again, but it also confirmed that eligible borrowers in SAVE will not be processed.
While this doesn’t impact many borrowers, those that are impacted need to take action. Waiting until 2026 to change repayment plans can open up your student loan forgiveness to taxes – which would be an unpleasant and expensive surprise.
5. Private Student Loan Borrowers Should Shop Around
If you have private loans, now is a good time to start shopping around and deciding if student loan refinancing could be the right move for you. The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates multiple times this year, and the result is that many student loan lenders have also lowered their interest rates.
The best student loan rates are still reserved for borrowers with excellent income and credit, but if you’ve been working a couple years and have made progress on your existing loans, it’s a good idea to know where you stand.
Compare a couple options and see if you can get a better interest rate on your loans if you refinance.
It’s essential that you only do this for private loans. Most borrowers should not refinance federal loans, since the borrower protections (such as income driven repayment, loan forgiveness, and hardship options) are fantastic. Giving those up for a small change in interest rates is usually not worthwhile.