The U.S. Department of Education has officially launched the 2026–27 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for all students. The form became available on Wednesday, September 25, 2025, about a week ahead of the congressionally mandated October 1 deadline, marking a significant shift from the troubled rollouts of the previous two years.
U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon described the release as the "earliest launch in the program’s history," signaling the department's efforts to restore stability to the federal student aid process after widespread disruptions.
Key Takeaways
- The 2026-27 FAFSA form was released to all students on September 25, 2025, ahead of the October 1 legal deadline.
- This on-time launch follows two consecutive years of significant delays and technical problems that disrupted college admissions cycles.
- The new form includes an improved process for inviting parents and other contributors to complete their sections.
- Despite the successful launch, a government watchdog report has raised concerns about the department's oversight of its technology contractors.
A Return to Schedule After Years of Disruption
The timely release of the new FAFSA is a notable development for students, families, and colleges. For the past two financial aid cycles, the application process has been marked by unprecedented delays and technical failures. In 2023, the department was tasked with implementing a major redesign of the FAFSA, which was intended to simplify the form by reducing the number of questions.
However, the redesigned 2024-25 form was not released until the last days of December 2023, nearly three months later than its traditional October 1 opening. This delay created a compressed timeline for students and families applying for financial aid.
Background on Recent FAFSA Issues
The 2024-25 FAFSA cycle was particularly challenging. After its late release, the form was plagued with technical glitches that prevented many students and families from successfully submitting their applications. Furthermore, the Education Department did not begin sending completed FAFSA data to colleges until March 2024. This information is crucial for colleges to create financial aid packages, and the delay forced hundreds of institutions to extend their traditional May 1 decision deadlines for students.
In response to the crisis, Congress passed a law in November 2024 that legally requires the Education Department to release the FAFSA by October 1 each year. The legislation also mandates that the U.S. Education Secretary must testify before Congress if the agency expects to miss this deadline.
"No one would have thought this was possible after the Biden-Harris administration infamously botched FAFSA’s rollout two short years ago," U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon stated on Wednesday.
New Features and Testing for the 2026-27 Form
To ensure a smoother process this year, the Education Department implemented several changes and conducted extensive testing. According to the agency, the 2026-27 application includes key updates designed to improve the user experience.
Key Improvements
The department highlighted two main enhancements for the current application cycle:
- Redesigned Contributor Invitation: The process for students to invite parents, a spouse, or a parent's spouse to provide their financial information has been simplified. This was a major point of difficulty in the previous cycle.
- Faster Account Verification: Students and parents should now experience a quicker process for verifying their accounts, reducing another common barrier to completion.
The department began beta testing the new form in early August 2025 to identify and resolve potential issues before the official launch. The results of this testing period were positive and indicated a more stable system.
Beta Testing by the Numbers
During the August beta testing phase, the Education Department reported the following activity:
- Nearly 44,000 FAFSA forms were started by students.
- Roughly 27,000 of those forms were successfully submitted.
- Almost 24,000 submitted forms were processed without rejection.
Ongoing Concerns About System Management
While the on-time launch has been widely welcomed, some oversight concerns remain. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a federal watchdog, questioned the Education Department's management of the contractors responsible for building the new FAFSA processing system that was first launched in 2023.
The GAO report, published earlier in September 2025, found that the department was not adequately tracking whether its third-party vendors were delivering on key contractual requirements. For example, in September 2024, the department acknowledged that several contracted functions, such as the ability for users to make corrections to their applications, were not yet available. At the time, the department estimated these features would be ready by 2026.
However, when GAO followed up in May 2025, the Education Department could not provide an update on the status of these features and stated it was no longer tracking the original contractual requirements. The GAO recommended that Federal Student Aid, the office overseeing the FAFSA, improve its contract monitoring practices.
Department Responds to Criticism
In a response included in the GAO report, Aaron Lemon-Strauss, the executive director of the FAFSA program, defended the department's approach. He argued that a rigid adherence to initial contracts is less effective than an agile model that adapts to the evolving needs of users.
Lemon-Strauss provided a specific example of this strategy. A contractually required feature was the ability for users to import their answers from a previous year's FAFSA. While acknowledging this feature is helpful, the department's internal data showed that approximately 5% of users were abandoning the application when they reached the step to invite contributors.
"Rather than mechanically moving to implementing renewal capability, the team examined user data to determine where their next efforts would be maximally useful," Lemon-Strauss wrote. Based on this data, the department chose to prioritize redesigning the contributor invitation process over implementing the data import feature. This decision, he argued, was made to directly address a significant pain point for users and improve the overall submission rate.
