What will my income-driven student loan payment be?

An income-driven payment is a subtraction and then a percentage, and your loan balance is not in either step. Start with the income your servicer certifies, usually the adjusted gross income from your last federal return: $65,000 at the inputs above. The federal poverty guideline for a household of 1 in the 48 states and DC is $15,960. IBR, new borrower shelters 150% of that figure, which is $23,940, and charges a share of what remains.

What remains is called discretionary income, and here it is $41,060. The plan takes 10.0% of it, $4,106 for the year, which is $342.17 a month and 6.3% of everything you earn. The 10-year standard schedule on the same $45,000 at 6.53% would charge $511.65, so the plan is $169.48 a month cheaper.

Every one of those amounts is a line the engine reported for this computation, not a rate applied from a table. That matters because it means the page cannot drift out of date quietly: the guideline, the shelter multiple, and the share are resolved from federal parameters stamped with effective dates, and if a parameter changes the number here changes with it. A lower monthly payment is not the same as a cheaper loan, though. The same balance at the same rate takes longer to clear, and the student loan payoff calculator shows what that does to the interest you pay in the end.

Holding the balance at $45,000, the rate at 6.53%, and family size at 1, this is what each plan charges as income moves. The first column is the standard 10-year schedule, which is the baseline and, on the older plans, the ceiling.

Two things in that grid are worth stopping on. The standard column never moves, because it is a fixed schedule on a fixed balance: the same $511.65 whether you earn $30,000 or $140,000. And the Repayment Assistance Plan column keeps climbing past it. At $30,000 it charges $50.00, well under the standard, and at $140,000 it charges $1,166.67, which is more than double the $511.65 standard payment on the same loan. The older plans stop at the standard payment. That one does not, because it charges a rising share of your whole income rather than a fixed share of what sits above the poverty guideline.

Which of these you can actually choose is not up to you alone. Your servicer decides which version of income-based repayment you qualify for from when you first borrowed, and forgiveness timing differs by plan in ways a monthly figure does not show. If you work for a government or a qualifying non-profit, the plan you pick is mostly a question of what keeps the public service loan forgiveness clock running at the lowest cost, not what is cheapest this month.

The older income-driven plans will not charge you more than the 10-year standard payment on the balance you had when you entered the plan. That sounds like a protection, and it is, but it also means a large group of borrowers gets no reduction at all from applying.

One thing to know before you read the figures below. The form asks for one balance and this page uses it for both jobs: the amount you owe now and the amount you owed when you entered the plan. For anyone pricing a plan they have not started yet those are the same number and nothing is lost. For anyone already enrolled and paying down, they are not: the real ceiling was fixed at enrolment and is higher than what today's balance would produce here, so the cap in these figures binds sooner than yours does. Enter the balance you had on the day you enrolled if you want your own ceiling rather than a fresh one.

Watch it bind. At $45,000 of debt the standard payment is $511.65 and IBR, new borrower charges $342.17, so the ceiling is above the charge and does nothing. Hold the income at $65,000 and drop the balance to $25,000: the standard payment falls to $284.25, the income-driven charge does not move, and the ceiling is now the lower of the two. The payment becomes $284.25, which is the standard payment exactly. You would be on an income-driven plan paying the standard bill.

That is the case worth checking before you file anything. If the plan caps you at the standard payment, the only thing enrolling buys is a forgiveness clock and protection if your income falls later. It costs you nothing to know which side of the line you are on: the calculator says so in a warning when the cap binds. If it does bind, the more useful question is how fast you can clear the balance instead, which the student loan payoff calculator answers on the same balance and rate.

Each additional person in your household raises the poverty guideline, which raises the amount the plan shelters, which lowers the payment. Same income, same debt, same rate:

Going from 1 to 4 takes the payment from $342.17 to $129.17 on identical income and identical debt. Family size is certified to your servicer every year, so it has to be true, but a great many borrowers undercount it: it is not the number of people on your tax return, it is you, your spouse, and anyone who receives more than half their support from you.

Filing status is the other lever, and it is the bigger one for a married borrower. On $65,000 of your income and $60,000 of your spouse's at family size 2, joint filing puts $125,000 into the formula and the payment is $511.65. Filing separately puts $65,000 in and the payment is $271.17, a difference of $240.48 a month, $2,886 a year. Read that joint figure carefully, because it is not the formula's output. The share of $125,000 this plan charges comes to $771.17 a month, and the 10-year standard payment on the same balance, $511.65, caps it there. The gap is bounded by that ceiling: on a larger balance the ceiling would sit higher and separate filing would be worth more than $240.48 a month, not less. The saving is also not free: separate filing loses you the joint brackets and several credits. Price the tax side on the federal income tax calculator and compare the two annual figures, because it is one decision, not two.

Two kinds of refusal are visible on this page, and both are deliberate. The first is plans. The engine holds federal repayment parameters stamped with effective dates, and when a plan's window closes it stops computing rather than extending an expired schedule forward. At 2026-08-22 it refuses 2 of them: REPAYE, later SAVE, and ICR. None of them appear on the control above. Any calculator still showing you a payment on one of those is running arithmetic that no current parameter supports.

The second is loan types. The engine publishes a capability matrix naming which federal loan programs it will compute and which it refuses, and the loan-type control above offers exactly the certified rows and nothing else. It refuses Parent PLUS, Direct consolidation that absorbed a Parent PLUS loan, FFEL Stafford, FFEL PLUS, FFEL consolidation, Perkins, HEAL and other legacy health education loans. Those are not oversights: each has its own statutory authority the engine has not parameterised, or is an excepted loan that no income-driven plan on this page reaches at all. A Parent PLUS loan in particular is the classic trap, because the standard advice about consolidating it into a Direct loan runs straight into rules this page does not model. This assumes none of the loans inside your consolidation was a Parent PLUS loan. If one was, the consolidation is an excepted loan, no income-driven plan on this page applies to it, and the engine refuses to compute rather than guess.

Past those two refusals there is a qualification, and it belongs in the same section because it is the same instinct. The engine grades its own answer, and it grades this one advisory rather than exact. The engine also runs a public service loan forgiveness check on every computation, and that check needs facts this calculator does not ask for: whether the month was full-time qualifying employment, whether the payment was on time, and the count your servicer has already certified. Without them the engine grades the whole answer advisory rather than exact. The payment itself is unaffected. Every one of those diagnostics travels in the JSON twin alongside the payment, so nothing about the grade is hidden from a reader or from an agent.

Forgiveness, and what it costs. Every plan here ends in a discharge of the remaining balance after a set number of qualifying payments, and that horizon differs by plan and by whether your loans were for undergraduate or graduate study. This page prices the monthly payment, not the years, not the count your servicer has already certified, and not the tax treatment of the amount eventually forgiven. Those are the numbers that decide whether a lower payment is a good idea, and they need facts about your employment and your payment history that a form cannot ask for. The public service loan forgiveness calculator is the right surface for that side.

Interest, and what it does while you pay less. A payment below the interest accruing on the balance means the balance grows, and the plans differ sharply in whether they subsidise that gap, whether unpaid interest capitalises, and when. Nothing on this page projects a balance forward. A payment that is smaller today can be a larger debt in five years, and the two questions are not the same question.

Everything outside the federal system. Private student loans have no income-driven option at all and are not in any figure here. Neither is state tax, neither is what is actually left in your account after the payment, which the take-home pay calculator will show you, and neither is how a lender will read this payment when you apply for a mortgage. On that last one the number matters more than people expect: an income-driven payment is generally the figure that counts toward your debt-to-income ratio, so lowering it can change what you qualify for. Finally, your servicer, not this page, determines which version of income-based repayment you are eligible for and what your bill actually is.

This calculator is built to be used without a browser. Every input is a query parameter on this page, and the same parameters on the JSON twin return the complete answer as a document.

GET /tools/idr-payment.json?income=85000&balance=60000&family=2&plan=rap

The response carries inputs after parsing and clamping, result with the monthly payment, the 10-year standard payment and the difference, whether the standard payment capped the answer, the federal poverty guideline and the protected and discretionary amounts the engine reported, the share of income and of discretionary income, quotes with every plan priced side by side, unavailable with the plans the engine refused and the reason it gave, capabilities with its loan-type capability matrix, reliability and notes carrying its own diagnostics verbatim, plus sensitivity across income, family size, filing status, and poverty region, drivers ranked by effect with a plain sentence each, assumptions that say for every field whether you supplied it and name the source when the default came from one, sources with a URL and an as-of date for each source the tool cites, which is an empty list on the calculators whose every default is an example input rather than a published figure, warnings, a disclaimer, and in tool the canonicalUrl and jsonUrl that carry only your non-default parameters. The canonical URL is the answer's permanent address; use it when you cite the number.

Parameters, all optional, in any order:

• income ($ per year), default $65,000 per year.
• spouse ($ per year), default $0 per year.
• balance ($), default $45,000.
• rate (%), default 6.53%.
• family (count), default 1.
• kids (count), default 0.
• plan (one of standard-10-year, paye, ibr-new, ibr-earlier, rap), default ibr-new.
• filing (one of single, married-joint, married-separate, head-of-household), default single.
• program (one of direct-subsidized, direct-unsubsidized, grad-plus, direct-consolidation), default direct-unsubsidized.
• region (one of contiguous, alaska, hawaii), default contiguous.

Values accept plain numbers and loose human formats such as 100k, $100,000, or 6.5%. Unknown parameters are ignored, values outside a field's range are clamped and reported in warnings, and the endpoint never fails on bad input. Responses are cacheable for a day; the defaults change when their sources publish, and tool.version changes when the method does.

• HHS poverty guidelines for 2026 (91 FR 1797), as of 2026-01-15. The annual poverty guideline by family size and region. 34 CFR 685.209(b)(14) points repayment at this table, which is what sets the income the plans protect.
• 34 CFR Part 685 (William D. Ford Direct Loan Program), as of 2026-04-29. 685.208 sets the 10-year standard schedule, 685.209 sets discretionary income and the income-driven payment, and 685.219 sets public service loan forgiveness.
• RISE final regulations (91 FR 23768), as of 2026-05-01. The Repayment Assistance Plan schedule and its dependent offset, effective July 1, 2026. This is the rule the engine loads for RAP.

The poverty guideline, the multiple each plan shelters, the share it charges, and the effective dates that decide which plans exist at all are parameters the engine resolves and reports for every computation, not figures chosen for this page. The regulations and the Federal Register notices below are the authorities behind them. When the parameter set changes, the numbers on this page change with it.

Carlo is a personal finance agent. It knows your accounts, debts, and goals, so instead of a worked example at the income you typed it can see the income your servicer will actually certify, watch your family size and filing status change, and tell you in advance what recertification is going to do to the payment. Text it the question.

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