This is something that may just forever be a mystery, but it’s been bugging me so I thought I would see if anyone had any insight.

I am working towards PSLF (just over 3 years into the 10) and just submitted my 3rd Employment Certification Form. One of the outcomes of their assessment is an estimated eligibility date, which they define as the estimated date you will make your last qualifying payment and be considered eligible to apply for loan forgiveness. Every time I have submitted a form, this eligibility date is calculated as at least a full year later than I think it should be. For instance, I show my last payment will be in Jan of 2021 (assuming all monthly payments are qualifying), but my estimated eligibility date is 1/6/2022 (no idea why the 6th as my due date is the 28th of every month). I can anticipate there will be some random months that don’t qualify (primarily if they put me in administrative forbearance calculating my new IBR amount), but a full year? And why are they making that assumption? Am I missing something? If you’ve submitted an Employment Certification Form, did you estimated eligibility date make sense? I’m not too worried about it, it just always has seemed so weird and random to me.

My wife and I have run into this same problem with incorrect calculation of estimated eligible end date.  For last year they only counted 6 of the 12 months.  It took numerous phone calls and resubmission of Employment Certification Form before the file was reviewed and corrected.  I fully expect this to be an annual event as I do not have much faith in the people who work there or their systems.  Unfortunately, you just have to keep hounding them until they can adequately explain why the dates they gave you are correct, or until someone is willing to review your file and correct it.

Jeremy is right. The only solution is to constantly follow up with your loan servicer. I have found them to be very helpful if you are direct and clear with your questioning. I don’t think the date ultimately matters, because when your 120 payments are complete, you should presumably be good to go.

Point of clarification, though, Rob…I think the date does matter.  The servicer is using the number of eligible payments they think the borrower has made to determine that end date.  So if the date moved out 1-2 years, then they are essentially telling mstevens that 12-24 of their payments didn’t count.  If the borrower is keeping good records of payments, then I do agree that the date shouldn’t matter.  I would be more concerned with why the servicer keeps not counting so many of the payments.

Thank you for your input. The issue was more that the eligibility date wasn’t consistent with the number of payments that they agreed were qualifying (they agreed I had 84 payments remaining, but were estimating it would take 8 years to get there instead of 7). I just received the results of my most recent form and the eligibility date makes sense.