When Does FAFSA Open for 2027-28? Dates, Deadlines, and Prep

If you have a high school senior, the date you were waiting for has already passed: the 2027-28 FAFSA opened on September 23, 2026. The Department of Education announced that day that the form is online and available to the public, a week ahead of the October 1 deadline Congress wrote into law, and the second year in a row it has opened early.

Every date that matters for this cycle, in one place:

That table is the whole answer, and it is not really the useful part. The useful part is that the step which most often derails a family is one you can finish this week in about fifteen minutes, and almost nobody does it first.

The date, and why it came early

The Department announced in February 2026 that it was beginning work on the 2027-28 form and published draft materials for public comment. On August 25, 2026, Secretary McMahon certified to Congress that the form would launch on time, and on September 23 the Department announced it was live.

The hard date behind all of this is October 1. The FAFSA Deadline Act requires the Department to certify the launch by September 1 and to launch by October 1, a rule Congress wrote after a cycle that opened months late. This year the form beat that deadline by a week.

What it means for you is simple: there is nothing left to wait for. The state and college deadlines below are already running.

If you already filed during testing

Before the public launch, the 2027-28 form ran a testing period that anyone could ask to join through StudentAid.gov. If you got in and submitted, you are done. Federal Student Aid said that forms submitted during testing are real 2027-28 applications, and that you will not need to submit again now that the form is open to everyone.

If you were not selected, you lost nothing. Federal Student Aid also said there was no advantage or disadvantage to submitting during testing: it did not increase anyone's aid or move them ahead in any line. File now.

What is actually changing

Three things, per the Department's September 23 announcement, and they all point the same direction: less friction.

• Clearer language. Questions and instructions were rewritten to remove jargon.
• Contributor invites by text. A student can now invite a parent or other contributor by text message as well as by email.
• Renewals pre-populate, later this fall. Returning students will get data carried forward from a previous FAFSA. The Department says this arrives later this fall, so a returning student who files today may still be retyping some of it.

Two features carry over from last cycle: parents with more than one child applying can reuse their information instead of filling the same fields twice, and students can see their estimated Pell Grant eligibility in real time.

None of this changes who qualifies for what. It changes how long the form takes.

Which tax year: 2025, not 2026

The FAFSA uses prior-prior year income, meaning it reaches back two years from the start of the award year. The 2026-27 form used 2024 returns. The 2027-28 form uses 2025 returns.

This trips people up every single year, and it cuts both ways. If your household income dropped in 2026, the form will not know, because 2026 never appears on it. That is not something to solve by fudging the form. It is what a college's special-circumstances or professional-judgment process exists for, and you raise it with each financial aid office directly, after you file. See how to ask for a professional judgment review for how that request actually works.

The one thing to do before you start

Every contributor needs their own StudentAid.gov account.

A contributor is anyone asked to provide information and consent on the form: the student, and depending on the household, a parent, a parent's spouse, or the student's spouse. Each of them needs a separate account. You cannot share one, and a parent cannot create the student's account for them.

Here is why this comes first. A new account has to be verified against Social Security Administration records before it can be used on the FAFSA. The Department says that confirmation is now faster than in past cycles, but it is still a match against SSA records: if a name, date of birth, or Social Security number does not match exactly, that is a correction process, not a quick wait.

None of that is a problem today. All of it is a problem at 11pm on the night a state grant deadline closes.

So, now:

1. Work out who your contributors are. For most households this is obvious. For separated, divorced, or remarried parents it is the single most confusing part of the form, and it is worth resolving before you need the answer.
2. Each contributor creates their StudentAid.gov account and checks that it shows as matched. Iowa State's guide walks through where that status appears.
3. Find the 2025 return. Not to type numbers in, since tax data transfers from the IRS directly, but because consent is required for that transfer and it helps to know whose return is whose.
4. Draft the school list. You can add and remove schools later, so an imperfect list now is fine.

Why this cycle is different from the last one

The 2027-28 FAFSA is the first one this cohort will file with the new federal borrowing limits fully in effect. Since July 1, 2026, graduate borrowing is capped at $20,500 a year against a $100,000 aggregate, professional fields at $50,000 against $200,000, and the lifetime federal cap across all levels is $257,500. We covered the full picture in our guide to the OBBBA student loan changes, and what it means for Parent PLUS families in the Parent PLUS cap and which colleges stay affordable.

The practical consequence for an undergraduate family is not on the FAFSA itself. It is that federal loans are now less able to paper over a gap between what a school costs and what it offers you, which makes grant aid and the choice of school do more of the work. The FAFSA is how you get considered for the grant side, so a family that skips it because "we won't qualify for anything" is making a more expensive mistake this year than last.

If a gap is still there after aid, work the free-money side first, starting with the local, low-competition scholarships almost nobody applies to. Our private student loans after the federal caps guide covers what filling the remainder actually costs.

When does the 2027-28 FAFSA close?

The federal window stays open until the end of the award year: the standing rule is June 30, with corrections accepted into September. For the 2027-28 form, that means June 30, 2028. (The pattern holds cycle to cycle: the 2026-27 form's federal deadline is June 30, 2027.)

That date is late enough to be useless as a planning tool. The two deadlines that cost real money arrive far earlier:

• State grant deadlines. Several states award their grant money first-come, first-served, and those pools can close within weeks of the form opening. This is the actual argument for filing now rather than over winter break.
• Each college's priority date. Institutional aid is generally awarded against the school's own filing deadline, and those vary widely between schools on the same list.

Check both for every school you are applying to. They are not the same date, and neither is anywhere near June 2028. A senior who files in the first weeks the form is open has answered every deadline at once; a senior who files "before the deadline" has usually already missed the ones that carried money.

The short version

The 2027-28 FAFSA opened on September 23, 2026, and you can file now. The form uses your 2025 tax return. The language is simpler, contributors can be invited by text, and renewal data starts carrying forward later this fall.

And the highest-value thing you can do about any of it is make sure every contributor's StudentAid.gov account exists and is matched this week, while a mismatch is an inconvenience rather than a missed deadline.

One more thing, if any school on the list is private: the FAFSA may not be the only form you owe in October. See CSS Profile vs FAFSA for which schools want both, and why the two forms can reach different conclusions about the same family.