Is the FAFSA Ready for Prime Time?

This year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid is now widely available to students and is set to launch officially any day now—Education Department officials said in a press call last week that they expect it will be live by Friday.

After bringing in outside help and putting the form through two months of rigorous testing, the department opened the 2025–26 FAFSA to all students on Monday, in what it called “Expanded Beta Phase 4.” Department officials clarified to Inside Higher Ed that the form was still technically in the testing phase but was functionally open and had been expanded to ensure the system could handle a large volume of users.

Since Monday, students have submitted more than 50,000 FAFSA forms and partially completed 100,000 more, on top of the roughly 17,000 forms submitted throughout the testing period.

Colleges say that so far, the system is working with relatively few hitches. The University of Illinois Chicago helped the department test the FAFSA over the past month. In that time it received 1,200 student forms and has already processed about two-thirds of them.

Kiely Fletcher, UIC’s vice provost for enrollment management, said only 3 percent of submitters experienced technical glitches that stalled completion. And in the two days that the form has been available to the public, she’s yet to see any major issues arise. She helped a student fill one out on Tuesday morning and described the process as quick and easy.

Fletcher did note that some frustrating glitches cropped up during testing. For instance, if a parent wrote their street address in a way that didn’t exactly match their tax form—say, “St.” instead of “Street”—then they wouldn’t receive their contributor ID and would have to start over, she said. And she found this week’s transition to the Expanded Beta Phase confusing considering the form was available to everyone; she worried it was an echo of last year’s disastrous soft-launch language.

But over all, she said her cautious optimism is “heavier on the optimism than the caution.”

“There’s certainly still a few issues, and we’re curious to see what happens when they start receiving forms at scale,” Fletcher said. “I honestly think we’re in a better position than we were even in April of last cycle.”

Colleges Cross Their Fingers

There’s enormous pressure riding on the federal aid form’s rollout this year after last year’s overhaul led to months of delays and a slew of technical errors that threw colleges into chaos and stranded families in student aid limbo.

Last cycle, after Education Department officials announced that they wouldn’t send processed student forms to colleges until at least March, Southwestern University developed its own in-house student aid calculator to get a head start on packaging aid offers.

Tom Delahunt, Southwestern’s vice president for strategic enrollment, feels confident they won’t have to use it this time around.

“We’ll be more than happy to put our form back in storage,” he said.

He added that the Education Department’s transparency around testing the 2025–26 form reassured him that there would be fewer surprises this time. Southwestern has already begun processing some student aid forms, giving them about a five-month lead over last cycle.

“Now we’re just hoping the system works on a technical level, and that it can handle the influx of users when it launches,” Delahunt said.

Brian Ghanoo, assistant vice president for student financial services at Fordham University, said that while his institution wasn’t a partner in the department’s FAFSA testing, the past few weeks have boosted his confidence that this year’s rollout should go smoothly.

Ghanoo is still waiting on his software vendor, the College Board’s PowerFAIDS, to finish the necessary updates so Fordham can begin processing the new federal aid forms. A month ago other financial aid and enrollment offices, including George Mason University’s, told Inside Higher Ed they were waiting on their vendors, too. The disconnect between the software capabilities and the technical requirements of the new FAFSA proved to be a problem last cycle.

This year could be different. Delahunt said his software, Banner by Ellucian, is updated and ready for processing. And Ghanoo expects PowerFAIDS will be ready by mid-December.

Waiting for Assurance

Some college-access advocates are still worried that unaddressed glitches will cause problems again. Last cycle a persistent glitch locked children of undocumented immigrants out of the form because their parents often could not receive an FSA ID, a requirement under the new FAFSA. A department official told Inside Higher Ed last week that more than 700 students who have at least one parent without a Social Security number completed a form during the testing phase. But advocates say some workarounds may still be necessary, and rebuilding trust among the undocumented community is harder now than ever.

Lorena Tule-Romain, chief operating officer of the Texas-based immigrant student advocacy organization ImmSchools, spent much of the spring helping families with mixed citizenship status navigate those issues and complete their forms. Over the past week, her team has held FAFSA listening sessions in Dallas and San Antonio attended by hundreds of members of mixed-status families, all of them concerned about this year’s form.

While last year’s issues have left many mixed-status families nervous, Tule-Romain said most of the parents she’s spoken to this year are more worried that their child’s financial aid form could out them as undocumented to a newly elected Trump government that has promised mass deportations. Dozens of families who participated in the beta testing told her they’d begun filling out a form but stopped after the election.

“They’re not just worried about, ‘Will it work?’ They’re asking, ‘Is it safe to share my information?’ They’re not sure it’s worth it even if it means less money for college,” Tule-Romain said. “We are expecting a drop in FAFSAs as parents are more afraid … and while we want to reassure them, we really don’t know what [Trump] will do.”

Still, Tule-Romain is hopeful that the FAFSA process itself will be easier even if the political environment is uncertain.

“We’re more prepared now,” she said. “Some of the glitches have been resolved, and even if we run into problems, the community has already been through this, students’ counselors have some experience … I think it will be smoother this year.”

The department has also made improvements to support services that could help families facing persistent issues. Last cycle, the FSA’s call center was understaffed and overwhelmed when the form soft launched in January: A government investigation found that only a quarter of calls were answered in the first five months of the rollout, and hold times stretched for hours.

This year, after adding 700 new agents to its call centers, the department reported that average hold times were under one minute, and fewer than 0.1 percent of callers hung up before receiving help. Anticipating an influx of demand after the official launch, they’re planning to add another 225 agents.

For Delahunt, that progress is a sign that the department has learned from its mistakes. He said that’s enough for him to feel confident reassuring worried parents ahead of this year’s FAFSA launch.

“Last year, we didn’t just have no runway before the launch; we didn’t know where the end of the runway was because they kept moving the dates,” he said. “We are much more comfortable this year and we’ve been able to communicate that to families.”