About RAP Notes
Updated October 17, 2026
RAP Notes explains U.S. federal student loan repayment rules in plain language, with the formulas and the gaps labeled.
What this site is
An independent set of guides and one browser calculator. The guides follow Federal Student Aid pages, 34 CFR 685.209, and the Education Department's RISE fact sheet, as read on October 17, 2026. The calculator repeats that published arithmetic for numbers you type.
What this site is not
- Not the U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid, a loan servicer, a school, or a lender.
- Not a law firm, tax practice, or financial adviser. The banner on every page is the short version: not tax or financial advice.
- Not a place that can see your loan, change a plan, or file a form. Do that on StudentAid.gov or with your servicer, for free.
- Not a source of lender prices or made-up borrower counts. None of those are published here because we do not have them.
How the estimates are made
RAP's annual base comes from the AGI bands in the regulation. That amount is divided by 12, then reduced by $50 for each dependent, then raised to $10 if it is lower. The interest line is monthly, not daily. The principal match follows the rule that a full on-time payment which reduces principal by less than $50 gets a match of the lesser of $50 or the payment, minus principal already paid.
Tiered Standard picks 10, 15, 20, or 25 years from the balance bands and uses a standard amortization formula, with a $50 minimum. The 10-year Standard row is always 120 months and does not use that minimum. Details and the open questions are on the comparator page.
Sources and dates
Each guide ends with the pages it used and the date they were read. If a later rule or court order changes a point, the guide is stale until it is edited. The site does not claim to track changes after October 17, 2026.
Corrections
If a figure or a citation is wrong, use the contact form. Do not include an account number, an FSA ID, or a Social Security number. We cannot look up a loan.
What we could not verify
These limits sit on top of the notes inside each guide.
- Search volumes for the topics. No SEO tool was used.
- Affiliate networks, commission amounts, and payout rules. No referral link is turned on.
- The married-filing proration formula, the tax treatment of the principal match, and Parent PLUS under the Grad PLUS interim exception.
- Whether IBR continues after July 1, 2028.
- The PSLF employer-eligibility litigation reported by a secondary source in July 2026. It was not confirmed on StudentAid.gov.
- The page studentaid.gov/bigupdates, which was not available when these notes were drafted.