Student Loan Refinance Calculator

Everything that makes federal loans federal. Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) wipes out the balance after 120 qualifying payments on Direct Loans while you work for a government or 501(c)(3) employer; private loans never qualify. Income-driven repayment plans (SAVE, PAYE, IBR, ICR) cap payments at a percentage of discretionary income and forgive the remainder after 20 to 25 years; private lenders do not offer comparable plans. You also lose generous deferment and forbearance options for unemployment, economic hardship, military service, and graduate school, plus death and total-and-permanent-disability discharge that wipes the balance for the borrower or their estate. Once a federal loan is refinanced into a private loan, none of those protections can be restored. The 2026 rate differential between federal and private lenders rarely justifies giving them up unless you have a stable high income, no plans for public service, no plans for graduate school, and a solid emergency fund.

Borrowers with a stable, well-above-average income, an established credit history (typically 700-plus FICO), no plans to use PSLF or income-driven repayment, no plans to return to school or take an unpaid sabbatical, and an emergency fund that can cover at least 3 to 6 months of expenses if income drops. Private refinance lenders price their lowest rates for high-credit, high-income borrowers with debt-to-income ratios below roughly 40%. Refinancing private student loans (which already lack federal protections) is almost always lower risk than refinancing federal loans, since you are only trading one private contract for another with a better rate.

Pre-qualification with most major refi lenders (SoFi, Earnest, Laurel Road, Splash Financial, ELFI) uses a soft credit pull that does not affect your score, so you can compare offers from several lenders without a hit. Only the final application uses a hard pull, which typically lowers the score by a few points and stays on your credit report for two years. Multiple hard inquiries for the same loan type within a 14-to-45-day window are treated as a single inquiry by FICO and VantageScore, so it is safe to formally apply with several lenders in a tight window to lock the best rate. The new loan also appears as a new tradeline, which briefly lowers average account age and adds a small temporary drag on the score.

A variable rate starts lower than the fixed rate for the same lender and term, but it floats with a benchmark (SOFR or Prime Rate) plus a margin and resets monthly or quarterly. If you can pay the loan off in roughly 5 years or less and you have the cash flow to absorb a rate increase, variable can win on total interest because rates rarely move dramatically inside a short payoff window. For terms of 10 years or more, fixed is almost always the right call: the discount on a variable rate is small (often 25 to 75 basis points), and the multi-year upside risk is large enough that a single rate-hike cycle (like 2022 to 2023) can erase the early savings and then some. Federal student loans are always fixed; refinancing into a variable private loan trades a guaranteed rate for a forecast.

Break-even months equals the origination fee in dollars divided by the monthly payment savings. A 1% origination fee on a $40,000 balance is $400; if the refinance drops your monthly payment by $80, break-even is 5 months. After month 5 the savings are net positive. Two caveats: first, most major student loan refi lenders (SoFi, Earnest, Laurel Road, ELFI) charge zero origination fee, so you only see this math with smaller or subprime lenders. Second, if your monthly payment is the same or higher after refinancing (common with a shorter new term), the fee has no monthly savings to amortize and the break-even is whenever cumulative interest savings exceed the fee, which is a longer horizon.