Become a Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Help Tool Ninja

Loan Repayment10 minutes

Learn how to use the PSLF Help Tool with an overview of the tool, information on searching for your employer in our database, and more.

PSLF Help Tool Overview

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program is for borrowers who work in public service in federal, state, tribal, or local government, or for a nonprofit organization. If you’re seeking PSLF, you can use the PSLF Help Tool to learn more about the program, whether your employer qualifies, and what you may need to do with your loans to qualify for PSLF. As of April 2023, you and your employer(s) can digitally sign the form, which allows for a faster form processing time.

You can use the PSLF Help Tool to apply for both PSLF and Temporary Expanded Public Service Loan Forgiveness (TEPSLF). The PSLF Help Tool can be used no matter where you are in the PSLF process, whether you want to apply for forgiveness right now or certify your employment to keep track of your progress.

Searching the Employer Database

Within the PSLF Help Tool, you can search for your employer to find out if they are listed as an eligible employer for PSLF. We update our employer database regularly and have millions of employer records.

Before you start a PSLF form, you can use our PSLF Employer Search to verify your employer’s eligibility without needing to log in to your StudentAid.gov account.

Tips for Finding Your Employer

The first step in the PSLF Help Tool is adding your past and current employers that haven’t already been certified. If you’ve already certified previous employment, then you don’t need to enter their information again.

In the Employment History step, you can select the “Add Employer” button to search for and add employers.
Select “Add Employer” to find your employer in our database.

When you use the PSLF Employer Search, you’ll be guided through the process to determine if your employer qualifies for PSLF. The search results will tell you if your employer doesn’t qualify for PSLF or isn’t listed within the database.

1

Using Your Employer’s EIN

To find your employer in our database, you’ll need to have your employer’s Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN/EIN). If you’re not sure what your employer’s EIN is, you can find it in box b of your W-2 or you can ask your employer.

When you search for employers, you’ll be asked to enter your employer’s EIN and employment dates.
Enter your employer’s EIN and your employment start and end date.

Make sure you have the correct number before entering it into the PSLF Help Tool, because having the wrong number can slow the process.

An employer’s FEIN/EIN is a different number than a state ID number. Both of these numbers may appear on your W-2, but since PSLF is a federal program, we need the federal number and not the state number.

Although you can manually enter your employer’s information, you will still need their EIN. If you enter your employer’s information manually and don’t use the information available in our database, your submission will take longer since we’ll need to verify any information you enter.

2

Understanding Your Search Results

When you search for your employer by EIN in the PSLF Help Tool, you might find some of the following eligibility statuses:

  1. Eligible—Your employer is already identified as qualifying for PSLF.
  2. Ineligible—Your employer doesn’t qualify for PSLF, likely because they are a for-profit organization.
  3. Undetermined/Not Found—We’ll need to review your employer’s eligibility.
  4. Split—Your employer’s eligibility is only PSLF-eligible for part of your employment. A “split” eligibility may happen if your employer switched between a for-profit and not-for-profit organization, or your employer may be an organization that formed, merged, or closed after the PSLF Program began in 2007.
If you searched the EIN for the State of Minnesota, you’d pull up two entries: “State of Minnesota” and “State of Minnesota - All Employees”
Most state employers share the same EIN.

After you select your employer from the search results, their information will appear in your PSLF form. If your employer is already marked as eligible, we won’t need to manually review your submission. If your employer is listed as ineligible or undetermined, we’ll manually review your application, but you should still use information in our database to make the manual review process faster.

3

What To Expect if You Work for a State Agency

When you search using your state agency’s EIN, you might find that the database shows their EIN as being tied to the state. For example, if you work for the Department of Natural Resources in Minnesota, this might show up as the “State of Minnesota” in our system. This is because many states will use the same EIN for all their state employees. States that do this will have the format of: “[Name of State] – All Employees.” Use this result if you are a state employee.

To add an employer from the search results, select the entry you want and then select the “Continue” button. This will add this employer to your PSLF form.
State employees should select the “State of Minnesota – All Employees” option.

4

What To Expect if You Work for the Federal Government

If you work for the federal government, you might find that your search results in multiple agencies. This is because many federal departments share a common EIN. If the EIN matches with too many agencies, you might need to look closely at the search results to find your specific agency.

The EIN that was issued to the U.S. Department of the Interior covers a large portion of the federal government. If you search for that EIN, you’ll come up with many pages of entries.
Many government agencies have EINs that cover a large number of offices, which will require government employees to search through multiple pages to find the right one.

While all federal agencies are qualifying employers for PSLF, you’ll still need to select the information in our database, or we’ll need to do a manual review. With federal employers, we certify at the department level, meaning your agency or office of a department doesn’t matter, nor does which command you’re aligned with in the military or which VA medical center you work in.

5

Noticing Differences in Your Employer Address

When you find your employer in our database, you might notice a different employer address than where you typically work. This is because our employer address data is sourced from several difference places, most of which might be the address of their headquarters or their official address for financial or other legal documents.

While the address might be unfamiliar to you, it doesn’t mean this address is invalid. If the rest of the information matches your employer, this address might be the best one for your employer.

6

What To Do if Your Employer Isn’t Listed

If you searched for your employer by EIN and your employer isn’t there, double check that you searched using their federal EIN and not a state ID number.

If you search for an EIN that is not found in our database, you can manually add your employer instead.
You’ll need to manually enter your employer’s information if your EIN search doesn’t find any results.

After checking to make sure you entered the right number, you might find that there’s still nothing coming up and that’s okay. While we have millions of employers in our database, we could be missing your employer.

You’ll need to do a manual entry for your employer in the PSLF Help Tool. We recommend you enter your employer’s name exactly as it appears on your W-2 and that you upload a copy of your W-2 when you’re prompted to upload supporting documentation. After we review your submission, we’ll add your employer to our database.

While entering your employer information manually, you may notice that the form flags your employer as either as undetermined or ineligible. But there are plenty of instances of eligible employers we don’t have in the system yet. For example, we’ve found that many smaller, local government and some state organizations aren’t in our database yet. In general, organizations not in our database are flagged as likely ineligible in the PSLF Help Tool.

7

Your Employer Is Ineligible

An employer can turn up in our database as ineligible for a couple reasons. The most common reasons are that we’ve determined your employer is a for-profit organization or they’re a not-for-profit that isn’t a 501(c)(3) organization, meaning they don’t provide a qualifying service.

Some employers in our database are ineligible. You can still select an ineligible employer, but you will have to upload documentation after you select “Continue” button.
You can select ineligible employers, but you’ll need to upload additional documentation.

We use what information we have available to us in making decisions about whether employers are eligible, but we can update this when provided with documentation that challenges our decision. If you see that your employer is listed as ineligible, but you believe you have evidence which can support that your employer is eligible, submit documentation that supports your claim. You’ll need to be prepared to explain why you (and your employer) believe that your employer should be eligible.

On the Supporting Documentation page, you’ll see suggested examples of documentation. You can select “Upload File” to add your documents.
We recommend you provide additional documentation for ineligible employers or if your employer isn’t listed in our database.

However, in most cases, your employer is listed as ineligible because they are a for-profit organization. For-profit organizations don’t qualify as eligible employers for PSLF. Examples of ineligible employment include the following:

  • For-profit organizations, including for-profit contracted organizations
  • Labor unions
  • Partisan political organizations

We will still manually review these submissions, but before you submit, reconsider or ask your employer if you work at a for-profit organization.

8

Your Employer Uses a Professional Employer Organization (PEO)

In some cases, employers might use a PEO. Employers partner with PEOs to use their human resource services to help employ you. If you search the EIN on your W-2 and you don’t work for the listed company, then it is possible you’re seeing the PEO’s name.

You’ll need to check with your employer if they’re partnered with a PEO. If they say yes, then you’ll need to ask for your employer’s EIN and use that number instead of the one listed on your W-2.

PEOs are almost always for-profit organizations, which is why they’ll appear as ineligible in our database. Some examples of PEOs include ADP, Insperity, and TriNet.

9

State Law Prevents Your Employer From Directly Hiring You

In some states, state law prevents qualifying employers from directly hiring employees to fill certain positions or perform specific services. This most commonly occurs in the healthcare industry. Since some employers are unable to directly hire some employees, they’ll contract with an outside organization that can employ you.

If these are the conditions in which you’re employed, when you search the EIN on your W-2, the contracted organization will show up, which will likely show as ineligible. You should ask the employer (where you actually perform your work) if you are hired as a contract employee because of state law. If you are, then you should ask for the EIN of your employer to use in the PSLF Help Tool. You’ll also need someone from your employer’s organization, not the contracted organization, to certify your employment as if you were a direct employee for them.

Submitting Your PSLF Form

After you complete your PSLF form using the PSLF Help Tool, you can sign and submit it either digitally or manually.

Digital Submission

You can use the PSLF Help Tool to

  • digitally sign your PSLF form,
  • send your form to your employers to digitally sign the form to certify your employment, and
  • electronically submit for processing.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you can sign your form digitally. Since you have to log in to your StudentAid.gov account to use the PSLF Help Tool, you’ll just need to check a box confirming your information is correct and select “Continue.”

On the borrower signature page, you’ll be able to sign your form by selecting a box then the “Continue” button.
To sign your PSLF form, check the box to certify that your information is true, complete, and correct, then select “Continue.”

After you sign your PSLF form, you’ll need to provide an email address from your employer for an “authorized official.” An authorized official is someone who has access to your employment or service records and is approved by your employer to certify your employment or your service as an AmeriCorps or Peace Corps volunteer. Check with your organization to see who is allowed to certify your PSLF form.

If you select electronic signature, then enter the email address for your employer’s authorized official or check a box that says you don’t know your employer’s email address and will add it later.
Enter the email address for your employer’s authorized official so that your employer can sign your form.

Your authorized official can expect an email from the U.S. Department of Education’s office of Federal Student Aid via DocuSign (dse_NA4@docusign.net). Once your authorized official certifies your employment by signing digitally, your form will be electronically submitted for processing.

Manual Submission

You may also submit a PSLF form by downloading the PDF, printing the document, and having you and your employer(s) sign the form by hand.

  1. Mail – Addressed to the U.S. Department of Education, P.O. Box 300010, Greenville, TX 75403
  2. Fax – Sent to 540-212-2415
  3. Online – Uploaded by logging in at StudentAid.gov and visiting the “My Activity” section of your account Dashboard

If you submit a manual PSLF form, digital signatures from you or your employer must be drawn by hand (e.g., a signature drawn by hand in ink on a physical form—which can then be scanned and sent electronically or faxed, a signature drawn electronically by hand using a pointing device such as a mouse or stylus, or a signature drawn by hand and then digitized and embedded in the document) to be accepted.

Typed signatures, even if made to mimic a signature, or security-certificate-based signatures are not accepted.

After Submitting Your PSLF Form

After you submit a PSLF form and we confirm you have a qualifying employer and qualifying loans, we will determine how many qualifying payments you made during the employment period on your form. We’ll send you a letter telling you the number of qualifying payments you have made.

You can log in at StudentAid.gov and go to the “My Aid” section in your account Dashboard to see your PSLF progress. To understand next steps, visit “How to Manage your Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Progress on StudentAid.gov” for more information.

Tracking Your Forms

Once you’ve submitted your PSLF form with your employer’s signature, you can track it in the “My Activity” section of your StudentAid.gov account Dashboard. Here, you’ll be able to see whether your PSLF form is open (in progress), closed, or completed. You can select a form and learn

  • if review of your employer’s eligibility has been completed,
  • if your employer has electronically signed your form, and
  • if there are any next steps you should take.

Make sure to submit a PSLF form each year and whenever you change jobs to ensure your 120 qualifying payments are being tracked toward forgiveness.