FSA delays FAFSA rollout again to ensure full functionality

Southeast Missouri State University students can file their 2025-26 FAFSA forms when the Office of Federal Student Aid hopes to release them Sunday, Dec. 1.

Southeast Missourian file

For the second consecutive year, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) rollout will be delayed.

Unlike last year when the Dec. 30 release of a new, simplified form was met with multiple technical issues and Student Aid Index (SAI) errors, the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) hopes to release the 2025-26 FAFSA form Sunday, Dec. 1, with full functionality.

To achieve this, FSA is opening a “testing phase” beginning Tuesday, Oct. 1, but details about what that entails are unavailable.

“They have not given details on how this is going to work, but they’re going to do phase testing from Oct. 1 to Dec. 1 to figure out what any lingering problems are and fix them before everybody gets access in December,” said Kaitlyn Venta, director of Affordability with the Missouri College and Career Attainment Network (MOCAN). “They’re trying to get it open as early as they can, but also with full functionality. To get those last bugs out, they’re delaying the full opening, but having it open for a little bit at the beginning so that they can find the problems that are still in the system.”

According to Southeast Missouri State University’s Student Financial Services director Matthew Kearney, last year’s FAFSA rollout was “very bumpy.”

A couple of the issues Kearney identified from the 2024-25 application process included students experiencing website crashes when attempting to apply, and some receiving incorrect SAI information because of a student’s, or their parents’, tax information not being transferred from the Internal Revenue Service to the FAFSA.

“Our hope is that this delay for next year is happening because they’re actually trying to fix the problem and not just put a Band-Aid on it,” Kearney said, “because what we’re having to do this year is a lot of manual work, and reaching out to students and having them submit things that they shouldn’t normally need to. Our hope is that, with this delay, it will eventually make things better for students, parents and families in general, as well as the institutions.”

Kearney said the tax information issue led to students receiving financial aid offers they didn’t actually qualify for, which required SEMO’s financial aid office to scramble in order to correct the affected students’ information.

“It was showing a Student Aid Index that would indicate the student was eligible for a whole lot of need-based aid, basically showing that they had very little income in the house,” Kearney said. “They were going to get Pell Grants, Access Missouri and all these different kinds of need-based grant programs that are made for low-income families, and what we would have to do is reach out to those families and say, ‘We need you to submit your tax information to us, because we then need to go in and update the FAFSA so that way the SAI is accurate.’

“We had times where we would do that, and then their SAI would go up so much that they would lose all their Pell Grant money and they would lose their Access Missouri, so they received a financial aid offer looking as though they were going to have a lot of their charges covered when, in fact, they weren’t going to have any of the grants there. … It’s hard for us, because, now, even though it’s not Student Financial Services’ fault or the university’s fault that this is happening, we’re still the ones that are having to have those conversations. It inevitably falls on us to kind of get some of that blame.”

In the meantime, MOCAN — an organization that “exists to ensure Missouri students who could most benefit from education beyond high school have what they need to earn a credential leading to a rewarding career” — is recommending students and parents take initiatives and set up their FSA IDs, which is the username and password used to access all FSA websites, including www.StudentAid.gov.

“You go to the FAFSA website or the Federal Student Aid website and you create the account,” Venta said. “It’s a pretty simple sign-up, but you need to know your email, date of birth and Social Security number.”

In addition, MOCAN recommends students visit www.myscholarshipcentral.org to see what other financial resources they’re eligible for.

“We have more than 150 scholarship opportunities and $15 million is awarded through the site annually,” Venta said. “Our application will be up and ready to go in September.”