United States federal Direct student loans under the rules in force in 2026 — RAP, IBR and the Tiered Standard plan. It is not for private student loans, not for any other country, and not for the plan menu as it stood before the 2026 transition. That scope is printed on the workbook title, the first sheet, and the Sources sheet. Parent PLUS loans are excluded from RAP by rule, and the workbook says so where it matters.

About 7.5 million borrowers enrolled in SAVE must leave it. The Department of Education announced that servicers begin issuing exit notices from July 1, 2026, and each borrower has 90 days from their servicer's notice to choose a new plan; borrowers who do nothing are enrolled automatically in a standard-type plan. Existing borrowers can choose among RAP, Tiered Standard and IBR until July 1, 2028. Those statements come from the ED press release of March 27, 2026 and the ED fact sheet of June 9, 2026, both cited with URLs on the Sources sheet. The Deadline Tracker sheet turns the date on your own notice into your personal deadline.

Because the plans run for different lengths of time under different mechanisms. On the worked example in the file — AGI $55,000, one $40,000 loan at 6.5% — RAP's payment is $229.17 a month against the 15-year Tiered plan's $348.44. But RAP runs to month 360, and over its life it collects $82,501 against the Tiered plan's $62,720: the lower payment costs $19,781 more, and ends with $11,758 forgiven — which may itself be taxable. A monthly-payment calculator cannot see any of that; a full-horizon comparison is the only honest way to choose.

RAP's percentage applies to your whole AGI, not to the slice above a threshold. At $20,000 of AGI the annual base is 1% and the payment is $16.67 a month; at $20,001 the rate becomes 2% of all of it and the payment is $33.34. One dollar of extra income doubles the payment. The workbook computes this from the bracket table quoted verbatim from 34 CFR 685.209 on the Sources sheet, and the Scenarios sheet lets you test how close your own income sits to an edge.

On an on-time payment, any monthly interest your payment does not cover is waived — the balance cannot grow. And if your payment reduces principal by less than $50, the Department adds the difference, up to $50 a month: the match equals the lesser of $50 or your payment, minus what your payment already applied to principal. A $100 payment against $80 of interest gets a $30 match, not $50 — the workbook models the regulation's exact words, resolved against 34 CFR 685.209 and pinned by test fixtures either side of the cap. Both mechanisms attach to ON-TIME payments, which is why the on-time assumption is printed next to every projection.

Yes — RAP is a qualifying repayment plan for PSLF under 34 CFR 685.219(b)(28)(v) as amended in 2026, and the citation is on the Sources sheet. The PSLF View sheet compares plans on the 120-payment horizon. Where a plan's PSLF status was not primary-verified, the sheet labels it unverified instead of assuming.

Genuinely unsettled for balances forgiven after 2025, and this workbook does not pretend otherwise. It reports the forgiven amount for each plan and flags it as potential tax exposure — it never invents a tax figure. Ask a tax professional in the year forgiveness actually happens; the print pack's handover page has the four questions worth asking.

6 things, each listed in plain English on the Sources sheet: the IBR payment cap and interest capitalization (projections are suppressed, not guessed, where they would bind), the IBR hardship entry test (surfaced as an eligibility question), Alaska/Hawaii poverty guidelines (the 48-contiguous table is carried), the exact auto-transfer plan text for pre-2026 borrowers (described qualitatively), tax on forgiven balances, and spousal AGI under married-filing-separately. A file that guesses at rules it has not verified is worse than no file.

Two independent implementations of the same regulations. A Python model was written first — 16 fixtures pin the bracket cliff, the $10 floor, the match cap at $49.99 vs $50.01, the waiver, forgiveness at exactly month 360 — and the workbook was then rebuilt under 10 QA scenarios and compared against the model cell by cell: 630 assertions, zero disagreements, after a LibreOffice recalculation of all 7,381 formulas with zero errors. The Checks sheet then runs 16 live reconciliations on your own numbers.

Yes. Upload the .xlsx to Google Drive, choose File → Save as Google Sheets, and every formula computes identically — the file uses only classic functions (ROUND, IF, INDEX, MATCH, MIN, MAX, SUM, DATE, EDATE and kin), no macros, no add-ins. The included PDF walks through it in about two minutes, then tours each sheet.

Yes — enter each loan with its own balance, rate and first-disbursement date on the Your Situation sheet. The disbursement dates also drive eligibility: loans first disbursed on or after July 1, 2026 can use only RAP or Tiered Standard, and the workbook gates the plan menu by your own dates. What it does not model is mid-stream consolidation — that resets terms in ways that belong in a conversation with your servicer, and the call-log page exists for exactly that call.

An instant download: the .xlsx workbook, the 7-page print pack as four PDFs (US Letter and A4, colour and ink saver) and the Google Sheets set-up PDF. It opens in Excel 2016 or newer and in Google Sheets. If anything fails to open, reply to the receipt email and a human will sort it out — and the 14-day guarantee on the refund policy page applies to this file like any other.