September 29, 2026
On Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, Federal Student Aid (FSA) distributed the Fiscal Year 2023 (FY 2023) official cohort default rate (CDR) notification packages to all eligible domestic and foreign schools. FSA will publicly release the rates on Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026.
In this announcement, we provide information about the distribution of the official rates and the appeal process.
As expected, FY 2023 CDRs were significantly affected by the pause on federal student loan payments that began March 13, 2020. During the pause, borrowers with student loans held by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) were not required to make any payments, and no borrowers with ED-held loans entered default. As such, the FY 2023 CDRs should be interpreted with caution, as the results may provide an overly favorable picture of borrower repayment outcomes.
ED continues to urge all institutions of higher education to review their nonrepayment rate, which provides the percentage of William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan borrowers, on an institutional basis, who entered repayment between January 2020 and May 2025 and whose federal student loans were more than 90 days delinquent. On Sept. 22, 2026, ED updated the data on this cohort of borrowers as of August 2026.