By Catherine Brown, Senior Director, Policy and Advocacy
Reading time: One minute
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has scheduled a markup for H.R. 8932, The FAFSA Deadline Act, on Wednesday, July 10.
This legislation, proposed by Congresswoman Erin Houchin (R-IN) and Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), would change the date by which the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) must release the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) from January
1 to October 1. The Higher Education Act currently requires the US Secretary of Education to enable applicants to submit a FAFSA no later than January 1
and, “to the maximum extent practicable, on or around October 1 prior to the applicant’s planned year of enrollment.”
The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) strongly supports releasing the 2025-26 FAFSA on October 1. We co-led a coalition letter signed by 25 major higher education organizations just one month ago calling on FSA to release the FAFSA and all accompanying tools and resources and processing capabilities by October 1 and we said confirming the October 1 release date is our
highest policy priority heading into the 2025-26 FAFSA cycle.
But when it comes to this bill, we urge restraint. Codifying October 1 as the annual release date is the right thing to do. We’ve seen the consequences of a long-delayed release all year. To this day, national high school FAFSA completion rates are
11.6% lower than in 2023, and seven percentage points lower than 2019’s pre-COVID-19 pandemic rate of 54%.
But we are concerned that this bill as written could have the unintended consequence of incentivizing FSA to rush out a flawed FAFSA form that needs to be corrected, further delay a smoothly functioning system, and further frustrate students and families.
We urge the Education and the Workforce Committee to pass the bill with one adjustment: change the implementation date to 2025 (to apply to the 2026-27 FAFSA) to allow time for the planning and testing that will solve the root causes of the issues this
year and lay the foundation for a smoothly functioning system going forward.
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