Jill Desjean
September 21, 2026
The fiscal year (FY) 2023 federal student loan national cohort default rate (CDR), due later this month from the Department of Education (ED), is expected to rise from the FY 2022 rate. Set at zero for the past three years due to the Covid-19 payment pause (March 20, 2020 through September 1, 2023) and subsequent on-ramp to repayment (when borrowers were protected from the consequences of delinquency, including default, between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024), the FY 2023 CDR will be the first since FY 2019 that includes a default measurement period during which federal student loan borrowers could have potentially entered default status.
The CDR measures student loan defaults for the cohort of borrowers who entered repayment in the fiscal year that began four years prior and who defaulted in any of the three fiscal years that followed. So, the FY 2023 CDR, to be released later this month, will include borrowers who entered repayment between October 1, 2022, and September 30, 2023, and will consider defaults that occurred between October 1, 2022, and September 30, 2025.