Best free IDR calculator: Studentaid.gov Loan Simulator. Best for figuring out which plan saves you the most: Summer. Best for automating extra payments on the new plan: ChangEd.

If you’re one of the 7.5 million borrowers still enrolled in the SAVE plan, your inbox is about to get loud. The Department of Education confirmed on March 28 that servicers will start sending 90-day notices on July 1, 2026. The message: pick a new income-driven repayment plan or get auto-enrolled in Standard Repayment.

Standard Repayment is the 10-year, fixed-payment plan. For a lot of SAVE borrowers, that means payments jumping by $200 to $400 per month overnight. Maybe more. If you went onto SAVE specifically because you couldn’t afford the standard payment — and most people did — getting defaulted back into it is not a neutral outcome.

The good news, sort of: the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) opens on the same date, July 1. It’s the primary SAVE replacement. The bad news: nobody has a RAP calculator yet because final regulations aren’t published, and the existing IDR tools are scrambling to update. NerdWallet, The Washington Post, and The Hill all ran stories within 48 hours of the March 28 press release. The coverage was accurate. The advice was thin. “Contact your servicer” isn’t a plan.

Here’s what I’d actually do, right now, with the tools that exist.

Quick Comparison: Student Loan Repayment Tools

Tool	Cost	What It Does	Bank Linking	Best For
Studentaid.gov Loan Simulator	Free	Compares IDR plans side by side	No	First step — see your current options
Summer	Free for basic, $49–$149 for optimization	Analyzes forgiveness paths, finds savings	No	Figuring out which IDR plan saves the most over time
ChangEd	$1/mo	Round-ups toward student loan payments	Yes	Automating small extra payments without thinking
Undebt.it	Free (Premium $12/yr)	Multi-debt payoff planner	No	Planning payoff alongside other debts
YNAB	$14.99/mo	Full budgeting with debt paydown tracking	Yes	Budgeting around a new (higher) payment amount
Payitoff	Free (embedded in some lender apps)	IDR eligibility comparison	Varies	Quick eligibility check for multiple plans

What SAVE Borrowers Need to Understand Right Now

SAVE wasn’t just an IDR plan. It was the most generous IDR plan the Department of Education had ever offered. Payments were capped at 5% of discretionary income for undergraduate loans (other IDR plans use 10–15%). The discretionary income exemption was 225% of the federal poverty line, which meant a single person earning under roughly $33,000 paid nothing.

Courts struck it down. The Eighth Circuit issued an injunction in 2024. The Supreme Court declined to intervene. And on March 28, 2026, the Department of Education formally announced the wind-down timeline.

The sequence that matters:

1. July 1, 2026: Servicers begin sending 90-day notices to all SAVE enrollees. RAP opens for new enrollment.
2. October 1, 2026 (estimated): Borrowers who haven’t selected a new plan get moved to Standard Repayment.
3. Sometime before October: RAP details finalized, calculators updated, servicer systems (theoretically) ready.

That’s a tight window. Three months to understand a new plan that doesn’t fully exist yet, compare it to PAYE, IBR, and ICR, and submit an application through a servicer portal that historically crashes during high-traffic events. If you’ve ever tried to do anything on Studentaid.gov during a deadline period, you know.

The Tools, Ranked

Studentaid.gov Loan Simulator — Start Here

The Department of Education’s own Loan Simulator is free, pulls your actual loan data (if you log in with your FSA ID), and compares monthly payments across every available IDR plan. It’s clunky. The interface looks like it was designed in 2014 because it was. But the numbers are accurate because they’re calculated from your actual loan balances and terms.

Right now, the Loan Simulator shows SAVE, PAYE, IBR, and ICR. RAP isn’t in there yet. It will be — the Department of Education confirmed the tool will be updated “before the enrollment window opens.” Whether that means July 1 or June 30 at 11:59 PM is anyone’s guess.

What you can do today: log in, run the simulator, and see what your payments would be under PAYE or IBR. Those are your fallback plans if RAP isn’t ready or if the RAP terms turn out to be less favorable than expected. Knowing your PAYE payment amount right now gives you a floor to budget around.

I ran this last week with a $47,000 balance. The difference between Standard Repayment ($483/month) and IBR ($187/month) was $296. That’s the gap you’re managing, and seeing the actual number helps more than worrying about it abstractly.

Good for: Every SAVE borrower. This is step one. Free, uses your real loan data, takes 15 minutes.

Skip if: You want optimization advice, not just payment estimates. The Loan Simulator shows you what you’d pay. It doesn’t tell you which plan saves the most over time or maximizes forgiveness.

Summer — Best for Optimization and Forgiveness Analysis

Summer (meetsummer.org) exists for student loan borrowers trying to figure out IDR plans and forgiveness programs. The free version gives you a dashboard showing your loans, current plan, and estimated payments under each IDR option. The paid tiers ($49 for a one-time analysis, $149 for ongoing optimization) run a full financial model that accounts for forgiveness timelines, tax implications of forgiven balances, and total cost over the life of each plan.

That total-cost-over-time analysis is what the government tools miss. A plan with lower monthly payments isn’t always cheaper if you’re paying interest for 25 years instead of 20. Summer models this out and shows you the actual dollar difference.

I used Summer’s $49 analysis when I was deciding between PAYE and extended repayment. The model showed PAYE would cost $14,000 less in total payments over 20 years despite having similar monthly payments to extended, because the forgiveness kicked in earlier. That $49 paid for itself roughly 286 times over (if the model holds, and models are models, not guarantees).

Summer has confirmed they’ll add RAP modeling as soon as final terms are published. They’re one of the few tools that tracks forgiveness eligibility month by month, which matters if you’ve been making qualifying payments under SAVE that might count toward forgiveness under your next plan. The rules around payment credit transfers between plans are genuinely confusing. Summer is the best tool I’ve found for making sense of them.

Good for: Borrowers with $30,000+ in loans who need to decide between IDR plans and want forgiveness analysis. Especially useful if you’ve been in repayment for several years and have accumulated qualifying payments.

Skip if: Your balance is under $15,000 and you plan to pay it off within five years regardless. The optimization math matters less when the total amount is smaller and you’re not chasing forgiveness.

ChangEd — Best for Automating Extra Payments

ChangEd works like Acorns for student loans. Connect your bank account, and the app rounds up your everyday purchases to the nearest dollar, then batches those round-ups into payments toward your student loans. It connects directly to your loan servicer, so the extra payments go where they’re supposed to.

On its face, $12–$40/month in round-ups doesn’t move the needle much on a $47,000 balance. But compound interest works in reverse when you’re paying down debt. An extra $30/month on a $47,000 loan at 5.5% knocks about 14 months off a 20-year repayment timeline and saves roughly $2,100 in interest. For $1/month in app fees. That’s a return I’d take.

I used ChangEd for six months alongside my regular payments. The round-ups averaged $28/month, and I barely noticed the money leaving my checking account. The key insight: once you switch from SAVE to whatever comes next, your required payment will almost certainly go up. Making automatic extra payments on top of that higher required payment is how you keep the total cost from ballooning.

Good for: Borrowers who want to chip away at the balance without manually scheduling extra payments. People who respond better to set-it-and-forget-it than to monthly discipline. Pairs well with any IDR plan.

Skip if: Your checking account runs tight enough that random $0.50–$1.00 deductions could cause problems. ChangEd has low-balance protection, but I’d still be cautious if you’re budgeting through a recession.

Undebt.it — Best for Managing Student Loans Alongside Other Debt

If student loans are your only debt, Undebt.it is overkill. But if you’re carrying credit cards, a car payment, and student loans — which describes a lot of people — Undebt.it lets you model everything together and figure out the optimal payment strategy across all of it.

I covered Undebt.it in depth for credit card debt. The same logic applies here. Enter your student loans with their balances, interest rates, and minimum payments under your new IDR plan, then add your other debts. Undebt.it calculates whether you should send extra money to the credit card at 22% first or the student loan at 5.5%.

(Spoiler: it’s almost always the credit card. Student loan interest is tax-deductible up to $2,500/year. Credit card interest isn’t deductible at all. But seeing the math laid out removes the emotional guesswork.)

Good for: Borrowers juggling multiple types of debt who need to prioritize. The free tier handles this fine.

Skip if: Student loans are your only financial concern. Use the Loan Simulator for plan selection and ChangEd for extra payments.

YNAB — Best for Budgeting Around Higher Payments

Switching from SAVE to another IDR plan means your monthly payment is going up. Maybe by $100. Maybe by $300. If you’ve been budgeting around a SAVE-level payment for the past two years, your entire spending structure needs to absorb the increase.

YNAB is the best tool I’ve found for this kind of budget surgery. I’ve written about it extensively. The short version: YNAB forces you to assign every dollar a job, which means when your student loan payment increases by $200/month, you have to find $200 somewhere. Not in theory. In your actual budget, by moving actual dollars from one category to another.

That process of finding $200 — cutting a subscription here, reducing dining out there, maybe tracking your subscriptions more aggressively — is uncomfortable but clarifying. It’s better to do it in YNAB in June than to discover in October that your checking account can’t handle the new payment.

$14.99/month. Expensive for a budgeting app, but if your student loan payment is about to jump and you don’t have a clear picture of where you’ll absorb the increase, this is where you start.

Good for: Borrowers whose current budget barely works at SAVE payment levels and need to restructure before the higher payment hits.

Skip if: You already budget and can see exactly where the extra money comes from. A spreadsheet works if you’re a spreadsheet person.

What Is RAP, and Should You Wait for It?

The Repayment Assistance Plan is the Department of Education’s answer to the court-killed SAVE plan. Based on what’s been announced so far:

• Payments will be based on income and family size (like all IDR plans)
• The income exemption will be higher than pre-SAVE IDR plans but probably lower than SAVE’s 225% poverty line threshold
• Forgiveness will still exist after 20 or 25 years of payments
• Final terms are expected before the July 1 enrollment window

Should you wait for RAP before choosing a plan? Depends on your timeline.

If your grace period from SAVE ends before RAP details are final: Apply for PAYE or IBR now. You can switch to RAP later if the terms are better. Being on any IDR plan is better than getting auto-enrolled in Standard Repayment at $400+/month.

If RAP is available when you need to act: Compare RAP to PAYE and IBR using the Loan Simulator (once it’s updated). Summer will model the long-term difference. Pick the plan with the lowest total cost, not necessarily the lowest monthly payment.

If you’re close to forgiveness: This is where it gets complicated. Payments made under SAVE may or may not count toward forgiveness under a new plan. The Department of Education hasn’t been specific. Summer tracks qualifying payment counts, which is why I recommended it above. Don’t guess on this one.

The July 1 Deadline: What to Do This Week

You have three months. That sounds like enough time. It isn’t, once you factor in servicer processing times, hold queues, and the certainty that 7.5 million people will be trying to do this simultaneously.

Here’s a priority list:

This week:

• Log into Studentaid.gov. Run the Loan Simulator. Write down your payment under IBR, PAYE, and ICR.
• Check your servicer portal. Make sure your contact info is current. Confirm which plan you’re enrolled in shows as SAVE.
• If you have other debt, enter everything into Undebt.it and see how student loans fit into your total picture.

In April:

• Run your numbers through Summer. Understand the forgiveness timeline for each plan option.
• Start budgeting for the higher payment. If you use YNAB, create a target for the estimated new payment amount. If you don’t use YNAB, use whatever works — the point is to find the money now, not in October.

In June (when RAP details are finalized):

• Rerun the Loan Simulator with RAP included.
• Compare Summer’s updated analysis.
• Apply for your chosen plan through your servicer. Don’t wait until September. Servicers take 30–60 days to process IDR applications, and the backlog will be enormous.

What No App Can Fix

I want to be direct about this. These tools help you make better decisions. They don’t solve the structural problem, which is that 7.5 million people were on SAVE because they couldn’t afford higher payments, and now those higher payments are coming whether they can afford them or not.

If your income hasn’t changed since you enrolled in SAVE, switching to PAYE or IBR will still result in a payment you can manage — IDR plans are income-based by definition. The payments will be higher than SAVE. They’ll still be tied to what you earn.

The people who are genuinely at risk are those earning just enough to lose the lowest payment tiers but not enough for the increase to feel comfortable. If that’s you, the budget restructuring matters as much as the plan selection. Use the tools above for the plan math. Use YNAB or any solid budgeting app for the spending math. Both pieces need to work.

And if you’re in a situation where no IDR plan produces a payment you can handle — you’re in forbearance, you’re dealing with income loss, you’re stacking this on top of credit card debt and rent increases — talk to a nonprofit student loan counselor. Not a debt relief company that charges fees. A nonprofit. The Institute of Student Loan Advisors (TISLA) offers free counseling and is genuinely helpful. Apps are tools. Sometimes you need a person.

The Bottom Line

The SAVE plan is gone. RAP is coming but isn’t here yet. The 90-day clock starts July 1. If you do nothing, you end up in Standard Repayment, which is the most expensive option for anyone who qualified for income-driven repayment in the first place.

Start with the Loan Simulator this week — it takes 15 minutes and uses your actual loan data. Use Summer if you need to model forgiveness timelines or compare total costs. Set up ChangEd if you want extra payments running in the background. Budget for the higher payment now, while you still have time to adjust.

Three months isn’t generous. But it’s enough if you start this week instead of waiting for the notice.

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Reviewed March 2026. RAP plan details, IDR eligibility rules, and servicer processing times are changing. Verify current terms on Studentaid.gov before submitting any applications.