CRI, MOHELA and Nelnet Student Loans

Most calls about CRI start with “Is this real?” It is. Central Research won a federal servicing contract in April 2023, one of five awarded in the overhaul of the servicing system, and began handling borrower accounts in spring 2024. Before that, it worked as a collection agency on defaulted federal loans, which is why its name sometimes rings alarm bells. Today, if CRI is your servicer, your loans are in repayment, not in collections; defaulted loans are handled separately by the Default Resolution Group.

When your account moves to CRI, you’ll get a welcome notice, and online access at cri.studentaid.gov opens after that. Autopay may or may not carry over, so check. And compare the first CRI statement with the last one from your old servicer: principal, interest rate, plan and, if you’re pursuing forgiveness, your payment counts should all match.

MOHELA, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, absorbed the FedLoan portfolio and now services every borrower pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness. That volume has come with trouble. When payments restarted in October 2023, the Education Department withheld more than $7.2 million from MOHELA for failing to send timely bills to 2.5 million borrowers and ordered forbearance for those affected. It has also faced borrower lawsuits over its handling of PSLF accounts. For SAVE borrowers, MOHELA said its plan-change notices would go out in waves between July and October.

None of this means you should avoid MOHELA. You can’t. It means you should screenshot your payment counts, save every confirmation number, and send important requests in writing through the secure message center so there’s a dated record.

Nelnet is one of the oldest names in student lending and services both Direct Loans and older Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) accounts, including borrowers who came from Great Lakes. It told borrowers it was notifying nearly three million SAVE enrollees in waves, with all notices out by the end of the year. In late September, some Nelnet borrowers saw their 90-day deadlines move later by two to four weeks; others didn’t. The Education Department hasn’t explained the pattern. The practical lesson: trust the date shown in your own account and your own notice, not a date a friend got.

The department says servicers are notifying SAVE borrowers in groups, so two people with the same servicer can have different deadlines, and every SAVE borrower should be notified before the end of the year. Some borrowers’ final 30-day deadlines fall at the end of October. If yours passes without action, you’ll be placed on the Standard plan; if you consolidated, that may be a consolidation Standard plan with a term of up to 30 years.

Being moved isn’t a trap you can’t get out of. You can still apply for an income-driven plan afterward. But Standard payments are based on paying the whole balance off on a fixed schedule, so for many SAVE borrowers the first Standard bill is several times what they were used to. When we priced a $35,000 balance at 6% over ten years, the Standard payment came to about $389 a month, a big jump for someone who paid $0 or under $100 on SAVE.

RAP’s biggest change from older plans is that it has no protected slice of income. IBR and the old SAVE plan ignored income below 150% or 225% of the poverty line before calculating your payment; RAP applies its percentage to your whole adjusted gross income and then subtracts only $50 per dependent. In exchange, it has two real protections: any interest your payment doesn’t cover is waived, and if your on-time payment reduces principal by less than $50, the government adds a match so the balance drops by at least that much. Remaining debt is forgiven after 30 years, or after 120 qualifying payments for PSLF.

When we ran sample incomes for a single borrower with no children, RAP came out slightly cheaper than the newer version of IBR at lower and middle incomes, and more expensive at higher incomes. Both are much higher than SAVE was. The Center for American Progress estimated that borrowers moving from SAVE to RAP will pay about $2,163 more a year on average.

How it works: RAP applies its income band percentage to your full AGI, divides by 12, subtracts $50 per dependent and keeps a $10 floor. IBR takes income above 150% of this year’s poverty guideline for your family size (48 contiguous states) and applies 10% or 15%, capped at the 10-year Standard payment. Married borrowers who file jointly report combined income on RAP; IBR treatment of spouses depends on how you file. Parent PLUS loans can’t use RAP. With the defaults, a single borrower earning $55,000 with $35,000 of debt sees about $229 on RAP, $259 on IBR and $389 on Standard.

New Education Department data showed about 400,000 more borrowers defaulted by June, pushing the total above 9 million. In January, the department delayed administrative wage garnishment and Treasury offset, the tools that take paychecks, tax refunds and federal benefits without a court order, while it rolled out the new repayment plans. As of late October, no restart date had been announced. That pause is a window, not an amnesty. The debt still grows, and you’ll get written notice before any garnishment or offset begins.

Three practical points. First, payment counts on StudentAid.gov have had temporary update pauses this fall because of data problems, so screenshot your count before and after each certification. Second, buyback still lets you pay for past forbearance months to reach 120, but since March the price of SAVE-era months is calculated with IBR or similar formulas, which made it more expensive, and the backlog stood near 82,000 requests in October. Third, if you’re close to 120 payments, don’t consolidate without checking how it affects your count and plan options.