Today, the U.S. Department of Education (Department) announced several updates related to 2025–26 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) processing and support. The Department has received more than 1.5 million 2025–26 FAFSA submissions from students and has successfully processed and sent 7 million student records to institutions of higher education and states to prepare and package aid offers.
FAFSA Executive Leadership
The Department also announced that it has created new, permanent FAFSA leadership positions to oversee the process and technology moving forward. After working on the FAFSA team at Federal Student Aid (FSA) for the last five months, Aaron Lemon-Strauss has been named the FAFSA Program Executive Director. U.S. Digital Service expert Chris Cummings will serve as the acting Technical Advisor for the FAFSA form.
The Department made significant improvements to FSA’s management and operations that were vital to the execution of priorities this year. Creating permanent FAFSA leadership roles builds on the Department's efforts to modernize FSA, lessons from the new beta testing processes, and the successful release of the 2025–26 FAFSA form.
FAFSA Technical Updates
The Department continues to make technical updates to the FAFSA form to improve usability. This week, the Department successfully deployed a set of 49 updates that impact both the 2024–25 and 2025–26 FAFSA forms.
The fixes included resolving the issue which required married contributors who filed their taxes jointly to invite their spouse to the form, even though the spouse was not required and resolving the issue that sent erroneous emails notifying individuals that their StudentAid.gov account information was changed. The Department also fixed page-focus issues on the Invite Contributor page when accessing the FAFSA form on a Safari browser and addressed other targeted issues.
Fixes to the Department’s back-end systems include permitting the daily upload of the Federal School Code file, which will prevent students from adding inactive schools to the online FAFSA form. Within the FAFSA Partner Portal (FPP), the Department fixed an issue preventing proper editing of A-Numbers that were all 0s and enabled the ability for users to look up students by Transaction ID. In addition, the Department implemented changes that make it easier for Federal Student Aid Information Center (FSAIC) representatives to improve service to students and families. We remain committed to continued improvements and feature releases for the 2025–26 FAFSA form in the coming months. We will continue to list issues and provide status updates on the FAFSA Issue Alerts page and in the Technical Frequently Asked Questions and Known Issues guide. A listing of bug fixes will be reflected in these resources in the coming days.
FAFSA Support Strategies
The Department invested in boosting submission rate among high school students in the previous FAFSA cycle, helping more than 840,000 students submit the FAFSA form and access financial aid for college. In order to continue the effort to ensure that every student who wants to apply for federal financial aid can, the Department is announcing the next phase of the FAFSA Student Support Strategy. The Department will make another $50 million of federal funds available to states, school districts, non-profits, and other educational agencies and public and private organizations supporting 2025–26 FAFSA completion.
Additionally, the Department is making another $10 million of federal funds available for the next phase of the FAFSA College Support Strategy. The funds will support lower-resourced institutions of higher education in ensuring that their operational systems are prepared to process financial aid for the 2025–26 FAFSA form. This strategy will provide support from third-party technical assistance teams to help schools make system upgrades, adopt longer-term operational and technical changes needed for the improved FAFSA form, and train administrators and staff to develop internal policies and operations going forward.
FAFSA Help for Families
The Department is committed to ensuring students and families get the help they need to successfully submit a FAFSA form, including:
-
The Department recently hosted a webinar about completing and submitting the 2025–26 FAFSA form. The session included a live demonstration of the form, an overview of the financial aid process, and a guide to create a StudentAid.gov account. A recording is available at youtube.com/@FSAOutreach.
-
The Department has recently released a suite of resources to assist students and families in completing and submitting the FAFSA form during the 2025–26 cycle.
-
FSAIC now has FAFSA-only hours on evenings and weekends to provide FAFSA form support to students and families. The expanded hours extend through March 2, 2025. Students and families can reach agents at the FSAIC in English or in Spanish. Information on requesting interpretation services in additional languages can be accessed at StudentAid.gov/interpreter.
Contact Information
The Department welcomes our partners to continue using the Contact Customer Support form in FSA’s Partner Connect Help Center. To submit a question, please enter your name, email address, topic, and question. When submitting a question, please select the topic “FAFSA.”
Students and families with questions regarding the FAFSA form, should refer to the FAFSA Help Center.