What the FAFSA Decides, and When to File It

Almost every dollar of college money that is not a private scholarship starts with one free form. The FAFSA decides federal grants and loans, it decides work-study, and most states and most colleges use it to hand out their own money as well. For the hour it takes, nothing else a college applicant does pays as well.

What it actually decides

Filing one form puts you in front of several different pots of money:

• Federal grants, which are not repaid. The Pell Grant is the largest of them.
• Federal loans, which are repaid. A subsidised loan is a better loan than an unsubsidised one, and both are still a loan rather than aid.
• Work-study, which is a campus job rather than a cheque.
• State aid, in most states, usually with its own deadline and sometimes handed out until it runs out.
• The college's own grants, because most colleges use the FAFSA to decide their institutional aid, and some require it even for merit awards that have nothing to do with need.

That last line is the reason to file even when you are certain you earn too much to qualify. The form is the key to the college's own money, and a college cannot give you what it was never asked for.

When to file

The 2027-28 form is open now at fafsa.gov. It went live in the week of 23 September 2026, just over a week ahead of the 1 October date the law sets, the earliest the form has ever opened. File as soon as you have what it asks for.

The federal deadline is not the one to plan around. It sits at the end of the award year, long after every admission and aid decision has been made. What matters is your state's deadline and each college's own, both of which land months earlier, and some state aid is first-come rather than first-qualified. Find both dates before you file, not after.

Who has to be on it

A contributor is, in Federal Student Aid's own words, "anyone (student, the student's spouse, a biological or adoptive parent, or the parent's spouse) who's required to provide information on the FAFSA form" (Federal Student Aid).

Three things follow from that, and each one has stalled somebody's application:

• Every contributor needs their own StudentAid.gov account, in their own name. A parent cannot use the student's.
• Every contributor must give consent and approval for the Department to pull their tax information from the IRS.
• Without that consent, "the student will not be eligible for federal student aid". That is a refusal rather than a delay, and it applies even to a family that would otherwise have qualified for everything.

Set the accounts up before you sit down to file. Verifying a parent's identity can take days when the details do not match Social Security records, and that wait is not something you want between you and a state deadline.

Which parent, when they are not together

Not the one with legal custody, and not whoever claims the student on a tax return. Under the current rules, "if a dependent student's parents are divorced or separated, the one who provides the greater portion of the student's financial support will be the parent on the FAFSA form" (U.S. Department of Education). If that parent has remarried, their spouse is a contributor as well, whatever the student's relationship with them.

What comes out of it

A Student Aid Index, which Federal Student Aid describes as "an index number that's used to determine eligibility for need-based aid". It can go below zero, as far down as negative 1,500.

An index is not a bill. It is not what you will pay, and no college will send you an invoice for it. Each college subtracts your SAI from its own cost of attendance and then decides how much of the gap it is willing to cover, which is a decision rather than a formula. Two colleges reading the identical SAI routinely produce offers thousands of dollars apart. That is why the comparison that settles anything happens when the offers arrive rather than now.

To see the shape of it beforehand, the cost calculator works from what students at each income level are actually charged.

One change worth knowing about

Having a brother or sister in college at the same time used to reduce what a family was expected to pay, sometimes by a lot. It no longer does: the number of family members in college is not considered in the need analysis.

Financial aid officers can still take it into account case by case, using what is called professional judgment, but that is something you have to ask for. If your family will have two or three in college at once, make the ask, in writing, to each financial aid office, and do it early enough that somebody has time to read it.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Filing late. State and institutional money is limited in a way federal loans are not, so late can mean gone rather than delayed.
• Listing no colleges. Your information reaches only the colleges you put on the form.
• Skipping a contributor's consent. It ends the application rather than slowing it.
• Assuming you earn too much. The formula is not a straight line, and the college's own aid sits behind the same form either way.
• Leaving one parent to do it alone when the rules require two contributors.

After you file

• How to read a financial aid offer, and how to compare two of them on the same basis
• Why a loan is not financial aid
• What a college would actually cost you
• Where every figure on this site comes from