6.5 Million SAVE Plan Borrowers Trapped in Limbo: No Payments Count, but Interest Accrues

More than 6.5 million borrowers enrolled in the SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education) income-driven repayment plan were placed into administrative forbearance starting summer 2024 due to litigation (Missouri v. Biden), and as of August 2025 their loans began accruing interest again, yet months spent in this forced forbearance do not count toward the 20- or 25-year IDR forgiveness timeline. Why it matters: borrowers chose SAVE because it offered the lowest payments and interest subsidies, so when the plan was frozen by litigation they had no control over, they lost months (now approaching two years) of forgiveness progress, so their loan balances grew while the forgiveness clock was paused, so they now face higher total repayment costs than if they had never enrolled in SAVE, so millions of borrowers are financially worse off for having followed the government's own recommendation. The structural root cause is that the Department of Education launched SAVE as a regulation before it survived legal challenge, and there is no statutory mechanism to credit borrowers for forbearance time imposed on them by government litigation.