Mapping Your Future: Planned outages to impact financial aid application and repayment plan requests

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Planned outages to impact financial aid application and repayment plan requests

By Cathy Mueller

October 28, 2021

If you want to make applying for financial aid as easy as possible, you may want to avoid completing the application during a few specific times in November.

On October 26, the Department of Education announced that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) will be unavailable on the following dates and times during November:

  • Tuesday, November 2; 1:00 - 5:00 a.m. Eastern time (ET)
  • Saturday, November 13; 1:00 - 5:00 a.m. ET
  • Saturday, November 20; 8:00 a.m. - noon ET

Students and parents can still complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or request the Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) Plan during the outages. However, financial information will need to be entered manually or, for the IDR Plan request, alternative documentation will need to be provided.