Federal Student Loan Servicers: Who Has Your Loans in 2026

Five federal student loan servicers handle the Department of Education’s loans in repayment: Aidvantage, Edfinancial, MOHELA, Nelnet, and CRI. Two more cover special cases — ECSI for federally held Perkins loans, and the Default Resolution Group for loans already in default.

If a company you have never heard of started billing you, that is normal and it does not mean your loan was sold. The department assigns servicers, moves accounts between them, and does not ask your permission. Below is who currently holds federal loans, where the servicers that disappeared sent their borrowers, and the one thing worth doing before your account moves again.

These five companies handle Department of Education loans in repayment. Every one of them now operates on a StudentAid.gov address rather than its old commercial domain.

Aidvantage — aidvantage.studentaid.gov. Phone 800-722-1300, TDD/TTY 711, international 001-317-806-0580. General correspondence: Aidvantage – Federal Student Aid Loan Servicing, P.O. Box 300001, Greenville, TX 75403-3001. Read the Aidvantage overview.

Edfinancial — edfinancial.studentaid.gov. Phone 855-337-6884; military servicemembers 800-337-6884. General correspondence: Edfinancial Services, P.O. Box 36008, Knoxville, TN 37930-6008. Read the Edfinancial overview.

MOHELA — mohela.studentaid.gov. Direct Loan servicing 888-866-4352, TTY 711, international 636-532-0600. General correspondence: MOHELA, 633 Spirit Drive, Chesterfield, MO 63005-1243. Read the MOHELA overview.

Nelnet — nelnet.studentaid.gov. Phone 888-486-4722, TTY 711, international 303-696-3625, Military Solutions 855-324-4027. General correspondence: Nelnet, P.O. Box 82561, Lincoln, NE 68501-2561. Read the Nelnet overview.

CRI (Central Research, Inc.) — cri.studentaid.gov. Phone 833-355-4311, TTY 711; Military Solutions 833-355-4306. General correspondence: CRI, P.O. Box 83106, Lincoln, NE 68501-3106. Read the CRI overview.

Two others appear on the department’s official list because they cover situations the five above do not.

ECSI handles federally held Perkins loans at efpls.ed.gov, with a separate borrower portal at borrowerefpls.ed.gov. Phone 866-313-3797, which is the federal Perkins line and not the general Heartland ECSI number many schools list.

The Default Resolution Group handles federal loans that have already defaulted, at studentaid.gov/default-support. Phone 800-621-3115, TTY 877-825-9923. Payment history for defaulted loans, including wage garnishment and Treasury offset records, lives on the MyEdDebt site rather than with a servicer. More on what the Default Resolution Group does and on how collection on defaulted loans works, including wage garnishment.

This reflects the department’s published roster as of August 2026.

A servicer is a private company paid by the Department of Education to administer your loan. It does not own your debt, set your interest rate, or decide the rules of any program. It bills you, takes your payments, keeps your account records, and processes paperwork for the programs Congress and the department created.

A servicer can process a discharge application incorrectly. It cannot grant you a discharge the regulations do not allow, and no amount of pressure on a call will change a rule.

Day to day, your servicer handles billing and payment processing, deferment and forbearance requests, changes to your repayment plan, applications for forgiveness and discharge, your Form 1098-E for the student loan interest deduction, and your account history.

Some things that used to run through servicers now start on StudentAid.gov instead. Applications for income-driven repayment and Direct Consolidation are both submitted there, and your servicer implements the result rather than taking the application. Which plan to be on is a separate decision from who services the loan — see federal repayment plans and what changed.

The interest rate reduction for borrowers enrolled in auto pay increased from 0.25% to 1% on July 1, 2026, for Direct Loans disbursed on or after July 1, 2012. It runs through June 30, 2028, and borrowers not already enrolled have to sign up by 11:59 p.m. Eastern on September 30, 2026. If you are already on auto pay, the larger reduction applies without you doing anything, and cancelling auto pay ends it. You do not receive it during in-school, grace, deferment, or forbearance periods either, because auto pay is not drafted then, but it resumes when auto pay does.

Log in at StudentAid.gov, go to the “My Aid” section of your dashboard, and select “View loan servicer details.” That page is authoritative in a way a welcome letter is not: it shows what the department’s own records say, which is the version that governs.

If you cannot get into your account, the Federal Student Aid Information Center at 800-433-3243 can tell you who your servicer is.

If you have loans with more than one servicer, the dashboard lists each separately, and a payment sent to the wrong one will not find its way to the right account on its own. And if your loans are in default, you will not see a servicer in the usual sense — you will be routed to the Default Resolution Group.

You will also need your account number for most things beyond a basic balance question, and it is not the same as the tradeline number on your credit report.

Related: How to Find Your Student Loan Account Number

The department assigns you a servicer when your loan is first disbursed, and you do not choose it. New loans generally route to the servicer that already has your existing loans, which is why a borrower can accumulate a decade of debt with one company. The department can also move accounts between servicers on its own initiative, without a triggering event on your side.

That is the honest answer to why your loans moved: usually nothing you did caused it.

Five companies have left federal servicing in recent years, and the department has confirmed all five transfers are complete.

Navient borrowers went to Aidvantage. Navient left federal servicing and its Department of Education accounts moved to Aidvantage, a Maximus company. Its FFEL loans went to MOHELA separately, which is why one borrower can end up with both. More on what happened to Navient student loans.

Great Lakes borrowers went to Nelnet. Nelnet bought Great Lakes’ servicing business in 2018 and ran both brands before merging the accounts. If “USDOE/GLELSI” appears as a closed account on your credit report, that is this transfer showing up as a tradeline.

FedLoan Servicing borrowers went to MOHELA, Edfinancial, Aidvantage, or Nelnet. FedLoan, run by PHEAA, did not renew its contract, and its borrowers were split across four companies rather than moved as a block. That is why two people who both had FedLoan can now have different servicers. More on what happened to FedLoan Servicing.

Granite State borrowers went to Edfinancial.

OSLA borrowers went to Aidvantage.

If your servicer’s website changed from a .com to a StudentAid.gov address, that is a separate change and not a transfer. Under the department’s current servicing contract, servicers are required to use Federal Student Aid branding on borrower-facing websites and communications, which is why Aidvantage, Nelnet, Edfinancial, MOHELA, and CRI all now answer at StudentAid.gov addresses. Your loan did not move.

MOHELA is separately moving borrowers onto a new servicing system, which is a platform change rather than a change of company. If your account is in that group, see what the MOHELA transfer means for borrowers.

Two more changes are underway, and neither requires anything of you.

Servicing of federally held Perkins loans moves from ECSI to GCR Servicing, with completion anticipated December 1, 2026. Servicing of defaulted federal loans moves from the Default Resolution Group to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service under an agreement signed in March 2026. That second transfer is phased and unfinished — the Default Resolution Group is still the borrower-facing contact for defaulted loans, and you should keep paying whoever you are currently paying.

Your balance, interest rate, repayment plan, and loan terms all survive a transfer unchanged. The department is explicit that payments made during the handoff get credited to your account with the new servicer.

Your payment history is a different matter, and this is the part that catches people. Not all account records make it into the new servicer’s borrower-facing system. You will see your balance. You will often not see the individual payments you made over years with the old company, and once your access to the old servicer’s portal is gone, it is gone.

Transfers are also where servicing errors cluster. When servicing moved from ACS to other companies, the handoff produced over five million servicing errors affecting more than 1.3 million borrowers, including damage to borrowers’ progress toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Your own records are what let you prove an error happened.

So download your full payment history from your current servicer now, before any transfer, while you still have an account there. Export it, save the file somewhere you will still have it in five years, and do it again before any future move. This costs ten minutes and is the single most useful thing you can do about servicer changes.

If the transfer already happened and you no longer have access, a Privacy Act request is the route to records the new servicer cannot show you. It is slower than downloading a file, and it works.

The Department tracks qualifying payment counts for Public Service Loan Forgiveness and income-driven repayment centrally, and you can view them under “My Aid” at StudentAid.gov. A transfer does not by itself erase forgiveness progress. What it can do is introduce an error into the count, and if that happens, the only way to show the count is wrong is to produce the payments yourself. Screenshot those counts alongside your payment history. Reconstructing years of payments from bank statements after the fact is possible but expensive in time and rarely complete.

When a transfer happens, you should get notice from the outgoing servicer and a welcome letter from the incoming one. Once your account appears at the new company, confirm the balance and interest rate match what you had. Update any bank bill-pay or autopay instructions, because those do not transfer either and a payment sent to the old servicer can go missing. Re-enroll in auto pay if it did not carry over, since the interest rate reduction stops when auto pay does. And confirm your repayment plan is the one you were on.

Expect a delay before everything reconciles: payment information can take up to 30 business days to appear fully on the new servicer’s system, and a gap in the first weeks is not by itself a sign something went wrong.

If something did go wrong and the servicer will not fix it, the escalation path runs through the servicer’s own complaint unit, the Federal Student Aid Ombudsman Group, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and your state attorney general, in that order, and what you document along the way determines how far it gets.

Related: What to Do When Your Student Loan Servicer Won’t Help

A transfer will also show up on your credit report as an account closed and a new one opened, which looks alarming and is routine.

Related: What “Account Closed Due to Transfer” Means

Loans the department does not own are serviced by whoever the loan holder hired, by the school that made the loan, or by a private lender’s own servicer — and none of them appear on your StudentAid.gov dashboard the way a Department of Education loan does.

Commercially held FFEL loans are owned by banks and guaranty agencies rather than the department. Your servicer is whoever the loan holder hired. Check the “My Loan Servicers” section of your StudentAid.gov dashboard, or the most recent bill you received. American Education Services services many of these. So does Sloan Servicing, which does not appear on the department’s servicer list and is not one of the servicers for the loans the department owns, despite the similar look and the confusion the name creates.

Perkins loans not held by the department are usually serviced by the school that made the loan. Contact the college’s financial aid or bursar office rather than a federal servicer.

HEAL Program loans that are not in default go to whichever servicer has been billing you. Since September 10, 2024, defaulted HEAL loans and general HEAL questions go to the department’s HEAL Program team at 202-297-5938 or HEAL@ed.gov.

Private student loans never appear on StudentAid.gov at all. Contact the lender to find out whether it services the loan itself or hired a third party. Your credit report is the other reliable source — the servicer is listed on the tradeline with contact information.