Changelog

What has to be in an entry?

Five things, and an entry that cannot supply all five is not finished. The date the change was made. The rule file and version string that changed. The primary source it was changed against, named specifically enough to re-read — a section, not a homepage. What the change does to a computed result, in the direction it moves it. And confirmation that the test suite was re-run against the new values.

The fourth of those is the one that matters to a borrower. “Corrected the poverty guideline” says nothing; “raising the guideline raises protected income and therefore lowers every IBR, PAYE and ICR payment” tells you whether your own result moved and which way. Entries are written to that standard.

What triggers an entry?

Any edit to a rule file. That covers the obvious cases — a changed rate, bracket, threshold, term or forgiveness count — and three less obvious ones that get an entry just the same: a citation URL or label that turns out to be wrong, a rule the engine was applying in the wrong direction, and a modelling assumption that gets promoted to a verified value or demoted to a documented simplification.

A change to how a plan is explained does not get an entry. A change to what a plan computes always does, even when the visible effect is a rounding of a few cents, because the point of the record is that no number moved silently.

How are the rule files versioned?

Five rule sets back this section, and each is one dated JSON file carrying its own version string, an effectiveFrom date, an optional effectiveTo, and at least one citation with the date it was last verified:

• rap-2026-07-01 — the Repayment Assistance Plan: brackets, the dependent reduction, the interest waiver, the principal match, the forgiveness clock.
• plan-terms-2026-07-01 — IBR, PAYE, ICR and the fixed plans: percentages, poverty multipliers, terms, forgiveness counts, the 2028 sunset.
• tiered-standard-2026-07-01 — the four balance tiers and the terms they map to.
• poverty-guidelines-2026 — the HHS table for the contiguous 48 states, Alaska and Hawaii.
• tax-2026 — the taxability of forgiveness and the assumed marginal rate used to estimate it.

The version string carries the date the rules take effect, not a release number. Three of the five end in 2026-07-01 because that is the day the RISE final rule took effect; the other two carry a year, because they are annual tables. When an annual table is republished, a new dated file is created rather than the old one edited — so a scenario simulated under last year's guidelines still resolves to last year's guidelines, and the engine picks the file that applies from the simulation date rather than from today's.

What is pending verification right now?

A primary-source pass on 15 Aug 2026 read the RISE final rule in full from govinfo.gov and settled the three items flagged in the entry above: the 2026 HHS guidelines, all four Tiered Standard tiers, and RAP's behaviour at exact $10,000 multiples, where the regulation's “more than $X and not more than $Y” construction puts a boundary income in the lower band. Six items remain open, and none of them has been filled with an estimate.

• ICR's income-percentage factor is fixed at 1.0. The Department of Education sets it in a Federal Register notice published annually, and the 2026 notice has not been located. This is the one figure in the plan terms needing a yearly re-check.
• Graduated repayment's 24-month step has no regulatory basis and never will — 34 C.F.R. § 685.208(b)(6)(i) prescribes only “payments at two or more levels”. It closes by being labelled a simplification, which it now is.
• The assumed 22% marginal rate on taxed forgiveness is a modelling estimate, not a regulatory figure, and cannot be verified as one.
• 26 U.S.C. § 108(f) was obtainable only in the 2024 U.S. Code edition, so a later amendment cannot be ruled out from a primary source.
• Three citations point at congress.gov, which refuses automated requests. None has been read. Every figure they would support is independently verified against the RISE rule.
• The PAYE and IBR new-borrower tests each model one limb of a two-limb rule, which needs an input the form does not yet collect.

What gets re-checked, and when?

Three things on a calendar. The HHS poverty guidelines every January, because a new table is published each year and student loan repayment uses the guidelines currently in effect. The federal tax treatment of forgiveness every January, since the brackets behind the assumed rate are re-indexed annually and a lapsed exclusion can be restored. And the RISE rule and RAP each 1 July, the anniversary of the rule taking effect.

Indexed values drift predictably; statutory structure does not. This verification programme found a repayment cap that Congress had repealed underneath a rules file nobody was watching — in another engine on this site, but the lesson is general. The law gets watched, not only the tables. Standards for all of this are on the editorial policy page; the citations themselves are on the sources page.