Financial Aid Administrator here. For the 2025-2026 FAFSA, here's what you need to know: 1. A missing parent signature means your FAFSA is incomplete, not just waiting for corrections. The FSA system won't calculate your SAI until all required signatures are submitted. 2. Your parent needs to create their own FSA ID (if they haven't already) and sign electronically on studentaid.gov. 3. Mid-April is still plenty of time to complete your FAFSA for most schools' priority deadlines, including your May 1st deadline. 4. For the income corrections you mentioned: these can only be made AFTER your FAFSA is fully processed with all signatures. The correction process is available year-round. 5. Contact your school's financial aid office immediately to explain the situation. Many schools will hold your place in line for priority aid if you've submitted by their deadline but are dealing with FAFSA processing issues. Remember that this year's FAFSA has experienced significant delays due to the FAFSA Simplification Act implementation. Most schools are being more flexible with deadlines as a result.

My kid's FAFSA had this same issue! We thought both parents had signed but apparently my husband's signature didn't go through properly. We fixed it in early March and it took about 4 days to process after that. Then we were able to make income corrections the following week. So yes, mid-April is fine to make corrections, but get that signature issue fixed ASAP!

When I had this problem I just drove to my college financial aid office and filled out a paper form saying I tried to submit. They put a note on my account and I got my aid without any issues when the site came back up. In-person always works better than emails for this stuff.

Good news - I just checked the Federal Student Aid Twitter account and they've announced maintenance should be completed by 6AM Eastern tomorrow. Make sure you're ready to submit as soon as it's back up. And yes, calling your financial aid office works fine too - just document the date and time of your call and who you spoke with. If possible, ask them to send you an email confirming your conversation about the extension.

Just curious - did this affect your SAI score at all? Or was it purely an administrative error that didn't impact your actual aid amounts?

Great question! It didn't affect my SAI score at all. The error was just that they had marked my verification as

One more important thing to understand about the SAI - many colleges are still figuring out how to use it in their aid formulas since it's new. The SAI can actually go as low as -1500 (which wasn't possible with the old EFC), and this can mean more aid for very low-income families. While you're waiting, make sure your daughter has completed any school-specific financial aid forms too. Some schools have their own forms in addition to the FAFSA, like the CSS Profile for private colleges. Those forms aren't affected by the FAFSA delays.

Update: I finally got through to FSA and found out that applications submitted in the first two weeks of January got caught in a massive processing backlog. The rep told me they're working through them chronologically. January 1st submissions should be fully processed by end of this week according to them. STILL RIDICULOUS but at least there's a timeline now.

just be prepared for them to lose your paper application too... they "lost" my son's TWICE and we had to resubmit. make copies of EVERYTHING!!!!

UPDATE: Based on some of the advice here, I called FSA again today and specifically asked for a supervisor who specializes in identity verification issues. After explaining I had already called multiple times, they transferred me to someone in the "identity resolution team" who immediately spotted the issue - my middle name was showing up in their system but I'd left it blank on my FAFSA. Such a simple fix that previous reps never caught. Try this specific approach before resorting to paper!