Best Apps to Budget Your Wedding in 2026
RAP Starts July 1. Use These Tools to Pick Your Plan.
The Repayment Assistance Plan — RAP — opens for enrollment July 1, 2026. This is the largest overhaul of federal student loan repayment since income-driven plans were first introduced, affecting the 43 million Americans carrying federal loan debt. Most of the coverage treats it like something to think about in July. For Parent PLUS borrowers, the decision clock expires June 30 (26 days from today). Not a deadline to pick RAP. A deadline to consolidate, or permanently lose access to every income-driven repayment plan that exists.
Permanently.
Free calculators already exist to model what RAP means for your specific numbers before you have to choose. Most borrowers haven’t found them. Here’s the breakdown.
What You’re Actually Deciding — and When
Three different situations, three different clocks:
Parent PLUS borrowers: June 30, 2026 — 26 days
Unconsolidated Parent PLUS loans are losing access to every income-driven repayment plan after June 30. That includes RAP, IBR, ICR. All of them. And this is a disbursement deadline, not an application deadline. According to Inside Higher Ed, consolidation takes 30 to 60 days to process and disburse. If you haven’t started, the window may already be closed. If you’re a Parent PLUS borrower and you haven’t looked into this, stop reading and go to studentaid.gov.
SAVE borrowers: July 1 to ~October 1, 2026 — 90 days starting next month
Servicers begin sending 90-day notices to the 7.5 million borrowers still enrolled in SAVE starting July 1. The message: pick IBR or RAP, or get auto-enrolled in Standard Repayment. Standard Repayment is fixed payments over 10 years, the most expensive option for anyone who qualified for income-driven repayment in the first place. The window starts when your notice arrives, but servicer backlogs are real. Plan to start in July, not September.
New borrowers after July 1: permanent
Take out any new federal Direct Loan on or after July 1, 2026, and RAP becomes your only IDR option — not just for that new loan, but for all your existing loans. Legacy plans like IBR and PAYE disappear from your menu for everything. Currently on IBR with $40,000 in older loans and planning to take out a new grad school loan in August? Your entire balance shifts to RAP terms. No deadline on this one — it applies whenever you next borrow.
RAP Calculator Quick Guide
Tool Cost Best For rapstudentloan.com Free Fast RAP estimate; runs in browser, no data stored StudentLoanPlanner RAP Calculator Free RAP vs. IBR side-by-side comparison sum.money Free All plans compared, including forgiveness tax estimate TheCollegeInvestor RAP Calculator Free RAP payment estimate with plain-language explanation Studentaid.gov Loan Simulator Free Official comparison using your real FSA loan data
What Is the Repayment Assistance Plan?
The Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) is a new federal income-driven repayment plan launching July 1, 2026. Payments are set at 1–10% of full adjusted gross income, with a $10 monthly floor. Any remaining balance is forgiven after 30 years. RAP replaces SAVE, PAYE, and ICR for new borrowers.
That’s the 48-word version. The part that trips people up:
Every income-driven plan before RAP calculated payments based on discretionary income — your AGI minus some multiple of the federal poverty line. SAVE used 225% of the poverty line as the exemption, which meant low earners paid nothing. RAP uses your full AGI as the base. No poverty-line adjustment. This produces higher payments for lower earners who were on SAVE, and potentially lower payments for moderate-to-high earners who would have been subject to the old 10–15% discretionary income calculation.
Interest doesn’t capitalize in ways that balloon the balance, and the Department of Education contributes up to $50/month toward principal for borrowers whose payment doesn’t cover interest. Forgiveness comes at 30 years — five to ten years later than PAYE and some versions of IBR.
The Tools, One at a Time
rapstudentloan.com — Start Here
rapstudentloan.com is a purpose-built RAP calculator derived directly from the statutory language of the law. It runs entirely in your browser and stores nothing.
Enter your AGI and family size. You get your monthly RAP payment and year-by-year projections. The site also includes an income bracket table that shows exactly where the 1%–10% AGI tiers start and end — the clearest visual of the payment structure I’ve found anywhere.
This takes two minutes and gives you the number you need before using any of the comparison tools below. Do this first.
Skip if: You want cross-plan comparison. rapstudentloan.com is RAP-specific. For the full picture across all plans, use sum.money.
sum.money — Best for the Full Comparison, Including the Tax Hit
sum.money models every federal repayment plan side by side: Standard, Graduated, Extended, IBR, PAYE, ICR, and RAP. Each plan shows monthly payment, total paid over the life of the loan, forgiveness amount, and — this is the part most calculators skip — the estimated tax you’ll owe on the forgiven balance.
Federal IDR forgiveness is taxable income. If RAP forgives $70,000 of your balance in year 30, that’s $70,000 added to your income in that tax year. Depending on where your earnings land at that point, you’re looking at a $15,000–$25,000+ tax bill. The “tax bomb” is real, and seeing it in the comparison changes how the math looks. RAP’s 30-year timeline means a larger balance reaches forgiveness than it would under IBR’s 20–25 years. Whether the lower payments along the way offset the larger tax hit at the end depends entirely on your income trajectory.
sum.money lets you model income growth year by year, so you can run optimistic and conservative scenarios. It’s the most complete free comparison tool available for this decision.
The earlier March guide on SAVE plan alternatives covered broader repayment tools before RAP calculators were fully built out — sum.money is now updated for RAP across all plan comparisons.
Skip if: You’re on track for PSLF. Public service loan forgiveness is always tax-free, so the tax bomb calculation doesn’t apply. The Studentaid.gov Loan Simulator is the better starting point for PSLF borrowers.
StudentLoanPlanner RAP Calculator — Best for the RAP vs. IBR Decision
StudentLoanPlanner’s RAP calculator focuses on the comparison most SAVE borrowers are actually trying to make: RAP or IBR?
IBR is staying available for current borrowers. It caps payments at 10% of discretionary income (15% for pre-2014 borrowers) with forgiveness at 20 or 25 years. For some borrowers, IBR’s shorter forgiveness timeline produces a lower total cost even when monthly payments run higher. For others, RAP’s lower payments — particularly at moderate-to-higher income levels — add up to meaningful savings even at the 30-year mark.
The StudentLoanPlanner calculator uses 2026 federal poverty line figures and runs both sets of numbers side by side. Not as visually complete as sum.money, but faster if you already know IBR is your alternative and you want the direct comparison without modeling everything else.
They also have a broader income-based repayment calculator that compares RAP against all legacy plans if the two-plan view isn’t enough.
TheCollegeInvestor RAP Calculator — Best for Understanding Before Calculating
TheCollegeInvestor’s calculator pairs a payment estimator with one of the more thorough plain-language RAP explanations available. The calculation itself is straightforward — income, balance, family size — but the context layer alongside it is what makes this worth a look.
RAP’s AGI-based calculation confuses people who have spent years on SAVE or IBR. The site walks through examples at multiple income levels before asking for your numbers, which means the output makes intuitive sense rather than appearing as a figure you’re supposed to trust without understanding.
Good starting point if you want the mechanics explained before running the math.
Studentaid.gov Loan Simulator — When You Want Real Numbers, Not Estimates
The Loan Simulator on studentaid.gov now includes RAP. Log in with your FSA ID and it pulls your actual loan balances, terms, and current plan from the federal system. The comparison runs on real data.
The interface looks like it was designed in 2014 because it was. Log in anyway. Estimate-based calculators require you to remember your exact balance and interest rate — if those numbers are fuzzy, the estimates drift. The Loan Simulator anchors everything to what’s actually in your federal file.
SAVE Borrowers: What to Do Before July 1
The 90-day notices arrive starting July 1. Don’t wait for the notice to start thinking.
Run your numbers at rapstudentloan.com first — two minutes, gives you the RAP payment. Then pull up sum.money and run the full comparison including the tax-at-forgiveness estimate. Log into the Loan Simulator if you want to confirm against your real loan data. Then decide: RAP or IBR.
For most SAVE borrowers with moderate incomes and large balances, RAP payments will run higher than SAVE but lower than Standard Repayment. For borrowers close to forgiveness milestones who accumulated qualifying payments under SAVE, IBR’s shorter timeline may be worth the higher monthly cost. The comparison tools above make that math concrete.
Once you choose, apply through your servicer. Not a third-party site. Not a company that charges fees to file free federal paperwork. Servicer applications are free. Processing takes 30–60 days, and the backlog during the July–September window will be significant. Apply early.
If budget adjustment is the main concern — because any IDR plan costs more than SAVE — the budgeting apps guide for tighter margins covers tools worth using to find the room in your spending before the higher payment lands.
The New Loan Rule Is the One People Are Missing
This one doesn’t have a single deadline. It applies whenever you next borrow.
Take out any new federal Direct Loan after July 1, and RAP becomes your IDR plan for your entire loan portfolio — old loans and new. If you’re currently on IBR with ten-year-old loans and enroll in a graduate program in fall 2026, your IBR access ends when you accept the first disbursement.
For some borrowers, RAP is the better option anyway, and the switch is fine. For others — particularly those close to IBR forgiveness milestones or in PSLF programs — this is worth modeling carefully before accepting any new loan disbursement after July 1.
The debt payoff apps post is useful for modeling how different repayment structures interact with other debt obligations. Grad school loans rarely arrive in isolation.
What These Tools Can’t Do
The calculators above estimate monthly payments and total lifetime cost. They don’t account for servicer processing delays, recertification timing gaps, or how interest accrues during a plan transition. They also don’t model PSLF — if public service loan forgiveness is your path, the Studentaid.gov PSLF tracker matters far more than any RAP calculator.
And if no calculated payment is affordable — income disruption, overlapping debt, no margin in the budget — the right resource is a nonprofit student loan counselor through TISLA (The Institute of Student Loan Advisors). Free. Not a debt relief company. The tools above help you make better-informed decisions; they don’t change the underlying math if the payment genuinely doesn’t fit.
The Bottom Line
RAP launches July 1. The tools to model it are free and live. Most borrowers are waiting for their servicer notice to start thinking — which is the wrong order, especially for anyone with a June 30 deadline still unmet.
Action order:
- Parent PLUS borrowers: Consolidate now. The June 30 disbursement deadline is 26 days away and processing takes 30–60 days. You may have already run out of time, but confirm before assuming.
- SAVE borrowers: Run your numbers at rapstudentloan.com and sum.money before July. Apply for your chosen plan as soon as the window opens — servicer backlogs during this transition will be significant.
- Future borrowers: Model the new-loan rule before accepting any federal disbursement after July 1. The switch from IBR or PAYE to RAP for your entire portfolio is permanent once triggered.
The largest federal student loan repayment change in a generation didn’t come with an instruction manual. The calculators above are the closest thing to one.
RAP plan details sourced from the Congressional Research Service and The College Investor. Parent PLUS deadline reporting from Inside Higher Ed and StudentLoanPlanner. Tool features verified June 2026 — confirm current plan terms at studentaid.gov before submitting any application.
