Federal Student Aid (FSA) has identified and resolved an issue affecting how assets are incorporated in calculating the Student Aid Index (SAI) for a subset of Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) forms.
The issue arose in applications that included multiple contributors and met the following criteria:
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At least one user manually entered income and another imported income data from the Internal Revenue Service, and
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The combined adjusted gross income (AGI) placed the application near or across the asset inclusion threshold.
A subset of forms that met these criteria did not include the provided asset values in the SAI calculation, leading to a potentially incorrect SAI determination, and in a small set of cases, an incorrect Federal Pell Grant determination. We estimate that this issue affected approximately 20,000 2025–26 applicants and 2,700 2026–27 applicants. Within this subset, the impact on SAI was minor in the significant majority of cases. Only 20% of forms that would have had a different SAI would have received a different Federal Pell Grant calculation, and those differences were small dollar amounts.
FSA implemented a fix on Nov. 9, 2025. All applications submitted on or after Nov. 9 now accurately include asset information. This Electronic Announcement outlines how the U.S. Department of Education plans to address and resolve errors calculated prior to that fix.
These records will not be reprocessed. FSA made this determination based on the error being on the FSA side, the small financial impact, and any reprocessing causing significant additional burden to schools.
Please note that any submission or correction initiated by a student or an institution after November 9 will follow the updated logic. This includes new corrections for students with long-submitted applications, and corrections made to unrelated fields. In these cases, schools may be required to make adjustments, which could result in an updated SAI. If the updated SAI results in an adjusted Pell Grant amount, the school may be required to adjust a prior disbursement accordingly.
Financial aid administrators are welcome to trigger a new correction if they believe that assets were inaccurately included in a student's SAI calculation and would like to adjust and redisburse aid based on the updated SAI and/or Pell Grant eligibility, though we expect the impacts to be very small.
FSA has reprocessed affected records under Reject Code 16 (“Adjusted SAI Calculation”), which resulted in SAI changes for 2,700 students and estimated Federal Pell Grant eligibility changes for 600 students. The average change to the SAI is 1,000 and the average change to estimated Pell Grant eligibility is $80.
Students will be notified via email if their SAI or Federal Pell Grant eligibility changes as a result of the reprocessing.
If you have questions, please contact the FPS Help Desk at 1-800-330-5947 or by email at support@fps.ed.gov.