Two members of Congress introduced a bill on Sept. 4 aimed at the single most infuriating way to lose Public Service Loan Forgiveness: doing everything right for years, on the wrong repayment plan, and finding out only after the payments are already made. Reps. Bill Foster (D-IL) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) filed H.R. 10298, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Inclusion Act of 2026, and it went straight to the House Committee on Education and Workforce, where it sits now.

This isn’t about a glitch or a servicer error. It’s about the plan menu itself — the fact that some perfectly normal, federally offered repayment plans have never counted toward PSLF, and nobody tells you that until you’ve been paying into one of them for years. If you read our Aug. 27 coverage of PSLF credit reversals, this is a related but genuinely different problem. That story was about payment counts that used to be correct getting erased. This one is about payments that were never eligible in the first place, made by borrowers who had no way of knowing that going in.

Quick Verdict

The bill	H.R. 10298, the PSLF Inclusion Act of 2026
Introduced	Sept. 4, 2026, by Reps. Bill Foster (D-IL) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
Status	Referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce — not law, not scheduled for a vote
What it targets	Graduated, Extended, and new Tiered Standard repayment plans that currently earn zero PSLF credit
How it would help	Lets payments on those plans count toward a borrower’s first 60 qualifying payments
Why it matters	Historically, about 97% of PSLF applications get denied, and wrong-plan enrollment is one of the top reasons
Should you change plans now?	No. Nothing has passed. Keep doing whatever currently earns you PSLF credit

What Actually Went Wrong for So Many Borrowers

PSLF sounds simple on paper: work in public service, make 120 qualifying payments, get the rest forgiven. The part that isn’t simple is that “qualifying” has always depended on which repayment plan you’re on, and the plan menu has changed shape more than once since PSLF launched in 2007.

Standard 10-year, IBR, and RAP all earn PSLF credit right now, no end date attached. PAYE and ICR still count too, but only through June 30, 2028 — after that, payments on those plans stop earning PSLF credit under the phaseout in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Graduated repayment, Extended repayment, and the newer Tiered Standard plan have never counted at all.

Nobody hands a new borrower a chart of this. You enroll with your servicer, you pick whatever plan lowers your bill that month, and you find out years later — sometimes a decade later, sometimes at payment 118 — that a chunk of what you paid doesn’t exist as far as PSLF is concerned. That’s not a fringe scenario. It’s common enough that wrong-plan enrollment is one of the most frequently cited reasons behind PSLF’s brutal historical denial rate, which has sat around 97% since the program’s early years.

What Repayment Plans Currently Count Toward PSLF?

1. Standard 10-Year Repayment — always qualifies, no expiration.
2. Income-Based Repayment (IBR) — qualifies, no expiration.
3. Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) — qualifies, no expiration. Launched July 1, 2026 as the new default income-driven plan.
4. Pay As You Earn (PAYE) — qualifies only through June 30, 2028.
5. Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR) — qualifies only through June 30, 2028.
6. Graduated, Extended, and Tiered Standard plans — don’t qualify at all, under current law.

That last line is what H.R. 10298 is trying to change.

What the Bill Would Actually Do

The bill would let payments made under Graduated, Extended, and the new Tiered Standard repayment plans count toward a borrower’s first 60 qualifying PSLF payments — half the 120 needed for forgiveness. Not unlimited retroactive credit for an entire career on the wrong plan. Sixty payments, front-loaded, aimed squarely at the borrowers who started on one of these plans early on (often because it was the plan a servicer defaulted them into, or the one with the lowest initial bill) before switching to something PSLF-eligible once they understood the rules.

Foster’s office frames it plainly: the rising cost of higher education is already pushing people away from public-service careers, and a forgiveness program that quietly disqualifies the payments people made in good faith makes that worse, not better. The bill has eight cosponsors so far — a mix of Democrats and Republicans, including Alma Adams, Sanford Bishop, André Carson, Yvette Clarke, Angie Craig, Shomari Figures, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, alongside Fitzpatrick — which is the kind of bipartisan spread that at least gets a bill taken seriously in committee, even if it says nothing about whether it moves further.

Because it doesn’t. Referred to committee on introduction day is the default first step for basically every bill filed in Congress. Most bills that reach that point never get a hearing, let alone a floor vote. I’d treat H.R. 10298 as a proposal worth watching, not a change worth planning around — nothing about your PSLF payment count changes today because this bill exists.

Why This Is a Different Problem Than the August Credit Reversals

It’s worth being precise about the distinction, because both stories are about PSLF payment counts going wrong, and it’s easy to blur them into one generic “PSLF is broken” headline.

The credit reversal mess we covered in August is about payments that were already showing up as PSLF-qualifying and then got pulled back — some of it the Department correcting genuine coding errors, some of it borrowers losing credit for months that legitimately qualified, with no clear explanation either way. That’s a data integrity problem on payments the system already counted once.

H.R. 10298 is about payments that were never counted in the first place, because the plan itself sits outside PSLF’s eligible list. No system erased anything here — the payments were simply never eligible under current law, full stop, no matter how faithfully the borrower made them. One is a bug. The other is a design gap the bill is trying to close. Both land on the same borrower experience: a lower number than you expected, and no good way to have seen it coming.

Who This Bill Is Actually For

Borrowers who spent early years on Graduated or Extended repayment before switching to IBR or another eligible plan once they learned the rules — this is the clearest use case. Sixty payments of retroactive credit could meaningfully shorten the runway to forgiveness for someone who lost years to a plan nobody warned them about.

Newer Tiered Standard Plan enrollees who didn’t realize it doesn’t earn PSLF credit at all — this plan is new enough that a lot of people are learning about its PSLF status the hard way, if they’ve learned it yet.

Borrowers already on IBR, RAP, or Standard 10-year the whole time — this bill doesn’t change anything for you. You’re already accumulating eligible credit. Nothing to do here except keep certifying employment annually through the PSLF Help Tool.

Borrowers currently deciding between RAP and IBR for a plan switch — this bill doesn’t affect that decision at all, since both plans already qualify. Our RAP versus IBR calculator roundup is still the right resource for that math, separate from anything in H.R. 10298.

What to Do While This Sits in Committee

Nothing, in terms of your repayment plan. That’s not a dodge — it’s the actual right answer. A bill referred to committee three weeks ago isn’t a plan you can act on, and switching plans based on legislation that might never get a vote is how people end up worse off than if they’d just stayed put.

What is worth doing: figure out, right now, whether any part of your payment history sits on a plan that currently doesn’t count. Log into studentaid.gov and pull your payment history alongside your plan history — most servicers show both if you dig into the account details rather than the summary screen. If you spent time on Graduated, Extended, or Tiered Standard before switching, note the dates. If H.R. 10298 (or something like it) eventually passes, you’ll want your own records instead of waiting on the Department to reconstruct it for you — which, per the reversal problems we covered in August, is not something to assume happens cleanly.

If the bigger issue for you right now is that your monthly payment doesn’t fit your budget regardless of which plan you’re on, that’s a separate and more urgent problem than a bill in committee. A debt payoff app that models your loan against everything else you owe will tell you faster than any legislative tracker whether the math works this month.

The Bottom Line

H.R. 10298 targets a real and well-documented problem: borrowers who did years of qualifying work but landed on the wrong repayment plan through no fault of their own, and lost credit for payments they had no way to know wouldn’t count. Sixty payments of retroactive credit for Graduated, Extended, and Tiered Standard plans would meaningfully help a specific slice of PSLF borrowers if it becomes law.

It isn’t law. It’s a bipartisan bill with eight cosponsors sitting in committee, and most bills that start there don’t go further. Watch it if it applies to you, keep records of your plan history in the meantime, and don’t restructure your repayment strategy around legislation that hasn’t had a hearing yet.

---

Bill details, sponsors, and status from Congress.gov and GovInfo. Introduction announcement and denial statistics from Rep. Bill Foster’s office. Additional reporting from Newsweek. PAYE/ICR PSLF eligibility phaseout per current federal guidance on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s repayment plan changes. This bill has not passed — verify its status at Congress.gov before making any repayment decisions based on it.