Details Related to the 2025-26 FAFSA Form Launch, Opportunities for Engagement, and Additional Activities for the 2024-25 Cycle (2024)

On June 14, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) released new details on the launch of the 2025-26 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA^®) form and opportunities for our partners to submit feedback. This announcement provides additional details about the launch of the 2025-26 FAFSA form, opportunities for engagement, and the remaining core functionality we are planning for the 2024-25 cycle.

To date, more than 11 million 2024-25 FAFSA forms have been received and processed by the Department. We are closing the gap in year-over-year FAFSA submissions, thanks to the support and engagement of our partners, including through the Department’s FAFSA Student Support Strategy. The submissions gap is also shrinking—from nearly 40 percent in March to roughly 8 percent today.

We have heard from students, families, institutions, states, and those that support them that it is important for the 2025-26 FAFSA form to launch on October 1. The Department is working toward this goal and will share updates about additional functionalities as we learn more.

To ensure a smooth user experience during the upcoming FAFSA cycle, the 2025-26 FAFSA form will remain consistent with the 2024-25 form. As a result, and similar to previous years when we have not had major shifts in functionality, the 2025-26 form will not be made available for public comment. However, we will continue to focus our efforts on improving the user experience for students, families, and our partners and will collect feedback to inform our efforts, as described below.

The Department is announcing a series of listening sessions to take place over the coming weeks to inform how to better support students, families, colleges, states, and other partners for a successful 2025-26 FAFSA cycle. In addition, the Department will release a Request for Information (RFI) this summer to solicit feedback from those not able to attend the sessions.

The Department will request specific feedback on ways to improve the help text on the form, student tip sheets, or other direct communication to ensure applicants and contributors can successfully complete and submit the form. The Department will also request feedback from financial aid administrators, counselors and others on ways the Department can provide additional support to them in their work.

The listening sessions and RFI will also lead to the development of a new Better FAFSA Better Future Roadmap—to be released in late summer—that will outline new tools the Department is making available, such as additional trainings, webinars, counselor guides, and student tip sheets.

To help further support students and their families with submitting a 2024-25 FAFSA form, the Department is also announcing a new series of webinars and online videos. More information on these sessions and tools will be released in the coming weeks.

The Department is entering the final phases of testing on two functions: processing 2024-25 paper FAFSA forms—including those submitted by confined or incarcerated students—and the ability for schools to submit corrections electronically by entering the data manually via the FAFSA Partner Portal (FPP). We previously announced, via Electronic Announcement (EA) GENERAL-24-56, that these functionalities would be available by the end of June, and we expect to meet that milestone, contingent upon our remaining testing activities. In the weeks after the launch of FPP corrections, we will release additional enhancements.

We are working diligently to release additional functionality. Batch institutional corrections via the Electronic Data Exchange (EDE), as well as paper corrections, will be available in the first half of August.

While we will continue to make user improvements to the FAFSA form and experience —including as informed by the partner feedback described above—there are no other core functionalities being planned for 2024-25 as the Department shifts to focus on a successful 2025-26 launch.

We plan to perform additional identity verification and the NSLDS post-screening processes for 2024-25 FAFSA applications later in the calendar year. Additional 2024-25 FAFSA transactions that are flagged for identity verification or due to NSLDS post-screening will be generated at that time. In the coming days, we will share additional guidance, options, and tools for schools and vendors related to these functionalities.

Questions about the information in this announcement can be submitted to the Department using the Contact Customer Support form in Federal Student Aid’s Partner Connect Help Center. To submit a question, please enter your name, email address, topic, and question. When submitting a question related to this announcement, please select the topic “2024-25 FAFSA.”