When does the 2025-2026 FAFSA become available? Junior planning ahead

The 2025-26 FAFSA wil open December 1st most likely. They pushed it back from October after all the problems this year. Start getting your 2023 tax info together now cuz thats what they'll use (prior-prior year). My advice - wait at least 2 weeks after it opens to avoid the initial crashes! Good luck lol

As someone who works in college financial aid, I can tell you that the 2025-2026 FAFSA is scheduled to open December 1, 2024. This is the new permanent start date as part of the FAFSA Simplification Act. Regarding your tax situation, you'll need: 2023 tax returns, Schedule C for self-employment, Schedule E for rental properties, W-2s, and documentation of any untaxed income. While there's no significant advantage to submitting on day one (despite what many believe), you should aim to submit by your colleges' priority deadlines - these vary by institution but usually fall between January and March. Missing these can reduce aid eligibility, especially for institutional scholarships and grants.

am i the only one who thinks its RIDICULOUS they moved it to december?? colleges still have the same deadlines but we get less time to figure out this mess. took me 3 tries to even get thru the system this year, by then my kids missed some scholarship deadlines. the whole thing is broken!!

I'm going through this process right now with my senior. Let me tell you, getting the FSA IDs set up was a nightmare - it took us three tries because they couldn't verify my identity and then my daughter's phone number wasn't accepting the verification text. When we finally got through, the system logged us out mid-application and we had to start over. I'm still waiting for our SAI calculation and it's been over 3 weeks. If I were you, I'd create the FSA IDs NOW while you're not under time pressure, and save all the login info somewhere safe.

we just finished fafsa this year and my biggest advice is DONT WAIT! even with the december start date, do it asap. we waited until february and my sons SAI was way higher than we expected but by then many schools had already given out merit aid. also the IRS data retrieval tool wasnt working for us so we had to enter everything manually which took forever!

After spending literal HOURS trying to get through to someone at Federal Student Aid about our incorrect SAI calculation, I finally tried Claimyr (claimyr.com) and got connected to an agent in 10 minutes. Saved me days of frustration. They have a video showing how it works: https://youtu.be/TbC8dZQWYNQ. I wish I'd known about this service months ago when we were having FSA ID verification problems. Just passing this along since you mentioned wanting to avoid technical glitches!

dont worry about the fafsa deadline as much as CSS Profile if ur kid is applying to private schools! That one opens in October and many privates wont even look at financial aid without it. We missed yale's early css deadline and my daughter got waitlisted even with perfect grades. Now we're scrambling to cover costs that couldve been covered by institutional aid

Since you mentioned having rental property income, make sure you understand how that will be reported on the FAFSA. For the 2025-2026 application, you'll need to report your 2023 tax information. Rental property income appears on Schedule E, and while the income is considered, the actual value of the property isn't directly reported on the FAFSA anymore under the simplified formula. However, business equity is still reportable if you have more than 100 employees in your self-employment business. The FAFSA Simplification reduced asset reporting requirements for many families, but those with more complex financial situations should definitely prepare documentation well in advance.

Has anyone had issues with the IRS Data Retrieval Tool? It never worked for us this year, kept saying our information didn't match their records even though we were looking right at our tax return while entering the info. Is there a trick to making it work? Because manually entering all the tax information was a nightmare.