SAVE → RAP: Your Payment Shock
This calculator shows the dollar difference between your old SAVE payment and your new RAP payment so you can budget for the increase. Enter both amounts from your servicer — the tool does not estimate RAP for you. On a $42,000 balance the jump can reach hundreds per month. RAP opened July 1, 2026 under OBBBA, making the transition mandatory.
Your payment goes up by
Your payment falls by
a month — against the old figure, or a day.
Nothing changes — the two payments you entered are the same.
- Old payment
- New payment
- Monthly change
- Over a year
- Over five years
- Share of take-home, before
- Share of take-home, after
Budget the difference before the first new bill lands — a year has to come from somewhere.
Straight arithmetic on the two numbers you entered. Payments under income-driven plans are recertified every year, so treat any figure as good only until your next recertification date.
Why Payments Jump Under RAP
SAVE calculated payments at 5% of discretionary income for undergraduate loans and excluded small balances from payment requirements entirely in some cases. RAP uses a tiered structure: 1% to 10% of adjusted gross income depending on the bracket, with a minimum payment of $10 per month. For many borrowers, the percentage applied to their income is higher than what SAVE charged, which means a real increase in the monthly bill.
RAP does include protections that SAVE lacked in its final blocked form. Unpaid monthly interest is forgiven rather than capitalized, and the government matches up to $50 per month toward your principal. These provisions slow balance growth and guarantee at least modest progress toward payoff. However, borrowers on student-loan forums report that the immediate payment increase still catches households off guard—particularly those who budgeted around the lower SAVE amount during the forbearance period when interest resumed on August 1, 2025.
Absorbing the Shock
Start with the annual difference this calculator produces. If your payment rises by $180 per month, that is $2,160 per year that must come from somewhere. Identify whether the gap can be covered by trimming discretionary spending or whether it requires a structural change such as extending your repayment timeline through a different federal plan.
If you have federal loans only, you retain access to other IDR options like IBR. Compare RAP side by side with IBR before making a switch; the consolidation-vs-refinance calculator can help model that comparison. If the shock is severe enough to make you consider private refinancing, read the trade-off section on the refinance calculator page first—private loans eliminate your access to IDR, PSLF, and federal forbearance permanently. The goal is to find a payment you can sustain for years, not one that forces default within months.
RAP opened July 1, 2026 under OBBBA (P.L. 119-21). This tool does not compute your RAP payment—enter both amounts from your servicer to see the difference.
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Sources
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Sources: ed.gov RAP fact sheet (Jul 2026); congress.gov CRS product IF13075; OBBBA P.L. 119-21 §70201; earnest.com SAVE-vs-RAP comparison (2026).
- Federal Direct Consolidation Loan interest rate — the weighted average of the loans being consolidated, rounded up to the nearest one-eighth of one percent (Federal Student Aid, studentaid.gov, Loan Consolidation).
- Amortisation, daily interest accrual and payoff arithmetic — standard loan mathematics; every figure on this page is computed from the numbers you enter.