By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Four minutes
The National College Attainment Network's (NCAN) FAFSA Tracker for the 2025-26 FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, completion cycle launched today with data on Class
of 2025 high school seniors’ FAFSA completions through January 10. This is the eighth year for NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker, an interactive dashboard that displays FAFSA completion data at the national, state, and local levels and a trusted source for information
on trends both within and cross cycles.
Currently through January 10, approximately 20.4% of high school seniors have completed a FAFSA. There is a -3.9% change year-over-year in the number of FAFSA submissions from high school seniors. More on the (small)
distinction between submissions and completions follows later. Although it appears that the class of 2025 has some catching up to do here in the early going, NCAN suggests holding judgment until the end of January to give districts, schools, and other
partners a chance to roll out their FAFSA completion campaigns for students.
The entire college access and attainment field will be watching the high school Class of 2025 closely as we look for a rebound in FAFSA completion following the difficult 2024-25 cycle. Only 46% of the class of 2024 completed a FAFSA by June 30. However,
since the FAFSA’s launch in late November, reports show much better functionality, shorter completion times, and increased completion rates – all signs that point to a better launchpad into higher education for this year’s high school seniors.
Measuring FAFSA completion for the 2025-26 cycle is a little trickier than usual. Consider:
The FAFSA cycle usually opens on October 1.
The 2024-25 cycle opened on December 30 for FAFSA submissions but because FAFSA processing was delayed, the Tracker will not have year-over-year comparisons on FAFSA completions until about mid-March.
The 2025-26 cycle opened to all applicants on November 18 (ahead of the announced December 1 opening date), and data on FAFSA submissions and completions for this cycle are both currently available through January 10.
The FAFSA Tracker currently displays the follow key indicators:
Percentage of high school seniors submitting and completing: This uses 2025-26 cycle submission or completion counts divided by 12th grade enrollment estimates provided by the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education (WICHE)’s
Knocking at the College Door Project.
Year-over-year percent change in FAFSA submissions: This uses 2025-26 cycle submission counts compared against 2023-24 and 2024-25 cycle submission counts through the same week of the cycle.
NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker typically focuses on FAFSA completions, the delayed FAFSA processing in the 2024-25 cycle makes FAFSA submissions the comparison available to us at this point in the cycle.
As a reminder, FAFSA submissions include forms that have errors that students and/or contributors will need to fix before their form can be processed, at which point it becomes a FAFSA completion. The number of FAFSA completions is necessarily
a subset of (read: smaller than) submissions.
NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker relies on publicly available data from the US Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA),
which releases high school-level data on submissions and completions every Friday.
In mid-March, FSA will begin to release data files that allow for comparisons of FAFSA submissions and completions through the same date versus through the same week of the cycle. When that happens, the FAFSA Tracker will allow users to
select whether they would like to see the class of 2025’s year-over-year change benchmarked against the same week number of last year's cycle or against the same date as last year’s cycle.
Some things that NCAN will be watching closely as this cycle rolls out include:
Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, and Oklahoma are all implementing universal FAFSA policies for the first time for their high school classes of 2025. This means that seniors in these states will have to either complete the FAFSA or submit a waiver as a requirement
for high school graduation.
Conversely, Louisiana and New Hampshire both repealed their universal FAFSA policies after having them in place last year. Louisiana, the first state to implement such a policy, had one in place for the high school classes of 2018-2024. New Hampshire’s
policy was in effect only for the class of 2024. It will be interesting to see how FAFSA completion performance in these states proceeds without these policies.
Given that every state had a negative year-over-year percent change in FAFSA completion for high school seniors, which states will bounce back in 2025? Mathematically, because of the depressed levels of FAFSA completion last year, it should be relatively
easier to achieve positive year-over-year changes this year; whether that comes to fruition or not remains to be seen.
NCAN will be closely monitoring the 2025-26 FAFSA completion cycle and updating the FAFSA Tracker on a weekly basis. Our hope is that a smoother FAFSA process for students and families will see the nation make big gains on this important metric and get
back on-track for pre-pandemic levels of FAFSA completion and college-going.
Have questions, comments, concerns, or suggestions about NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker? We’d love to hear them. Contact Bill DeBaun at debaunb@ncan.org.
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