This Electronic Announcement provides an update on the launch of batch institutional corrections via the Electronic Data Exchange (EDE) for the 2024–25 and 2025–26 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) cycles. We also provide information about the resolution of an issue that resulted in a blank Student Aid Index (SAI) without a reject reason.
General Availability of Batch Corrections for 2024-25 and 2025-26
Processing of batch corrections for both the 2024–25 and 2025–26 cycles will begin on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025 at 12:01 p.m. Eastern time. Any file transmitted prior to that will be cleared from the queue and will not be processed. Batch correction files must be transmitted to Student Aid Internet Gateway (SAIG) mailbox TGDE552.
Over the last few weeks, we have been conducting beta testing of the batch corrections process. During this testing period we successfully processed 16 batch files containing corrections to over 200 records from both award years. We are grateful for the time and energy of the institutions that participated in beta testing with us to ensure that batch files are correctly transmitted and contain the proper corrections, and to ensure improved guidance.
Guidance for Implementing Batch Processing
As institutions begin batch processing for the first time since FAFSA Simplification, we want to note a series of implementation scenarios for submitting batch institutional corrections via EDE that may differ from prior experiences submitting corrections under the legacy Central Processing System (CPS). Please refer to the guidance and reminders below to navigate these scenarios and avoid unnecessary rejected ISIRs or incomplete corrections.
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Corrections to a field that requires adjustments to additional related fields must be submitted on the same transaction to avoid an error. If the remaining information is not adjusted, the correction will be rejected. Some common examples include:
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When updating High School Completion Status (field 69 in the ISIR layout) from blank to “HS Diploma,” you must also provide all remaining information about the high school, such as High School Name, High School City, and High School State (fields 70-72).
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If the tax filing status is changed from filer to non-filer, you must clear all individual tax data fields.
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The Professional Judgment (PJ) flag must be set to force the FAFSA Processing System (FPS) to override the use of Federal Tax Information (FTI) from the IRS. If you do not set the PJ flag, a new transaction will be generated containing and still using FTI in the Student Aid Index (SAI) calculation.
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If you deselect all values for the Federal Benefits Received question, you must set all values to blank (fields 75-83) and set “None of the Above (Federal Benefits)” (field 84) to “Yes.”
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A professional judgment cannot be submitted on a rejected transaction. You must first correct the record to resolve the rejection, wait for the corrected transaction to be processed by the FPS, and then submit a second correction with the PJ flag.
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Corrections made to a financial information field that is not required to be answered to calculate a particular student’s SAI calculation will be removed by FPS during processing and excluded from the corrected transaction. For example, if you submit a correction to the asset values for a student who is not required to report on their assets (i.e., they are exempt from reporting assets under the law), FPS will remove the corrected asset values from the ISIR since they were not used in the official SAI calculation. No action is needed as the system is functioning correctly.
General tips for successfully submitting batch corrections may be found under “Tips for EDE Corrections” in Volume 3 of the 2025-26 FAFSA Specifications Guide. Additional guidance for avoiding common edits and rejects, and resolving verifiable and non-verifiable rejects is outlined in the “Data Edits” portion of Volume 5 of the FAFSA Specifications Guide.
We are grateful to the financial aid community for their understanding regarding this guidance. The Department is committed to pursuing improvements to make this process smoother.
Resolution of Known Issue Causing ISIRs with Blank SAIs and No Reject Code
The Department has been working to address a known issue impacting 2024–25 and 2025–26 applications that resulted in blank Student Aid Indexes (SAIs) appearing on non-rejected ISIRs due to missing data from the Federal Tax Information Module (FTIM). Schools do not need to take any action to correct these records. Starting the week of Feb. 24, 2025, the Department will begin temporarily assigning Reject Code 68 and comment code 329 to these impacted records, indicating no action needed while the Department works to resolve the blank SAI. The Department anticipates implementing a permanent fix and reprocessing all impacted records within a few days after assigning the reject code. Once reprocessing is completed, schools will receive new system-generated ISIRs with the FPS Correction Reason code set to “A,” which reflects the FTIM Result Update. These records will no longer have the Reject Code 68 and will have a calculated SAI.
Contact Information
For technical issues related to ISIR processing:
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For help with technical issues related to ISIR processing, the SAIG, the FAFSA Partner Portal (FPP), or EDExpress, please contact the FPS Help Desk at 1-800-330-5947 or by email at support@fps.ed.gov.
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For general questions related to FAFSA processing, we welcome 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 “FAFSA Inquiries.”
We appreciate the community’s patience as we worked to make batch corrections available and to resolve this processing error.