Students and all contributors must register for an FSA ID to complete and sign the online 2024-2025 FAFSA.

To better protect your information, your FSA ID now requires a two-step verification process. To create one, you’ll need your name, social security number, and either an email address or phone number. Note: You will need your FSA ID to submit your FAFSA, but it could take up to five days to create your FSA ID. 

The ability to create an FSA ID has historically been limited only to parents who can be verified with a Social Security Number (SSN). However, now all parent and spouse contributors without a SSN can create one using the Department of Education's newly developed system to validate identity. Check out these step by step instructions on how to contributors without a SSN can obtain a FSA ID. 

All contributors are encouraged to create the FSA ID as soon as they are able to. Set up your FSA ID on studentaid.gov to make sure your FSA ID is ready to sign the 2024-2025 FAFSA.

A new term is coming to the 2024-2025 FAFSA - “contributor”. A contributor is anyone who is required to provide information, a signature, and consent to have their federal tax information (FTI) transferred directly into the FAFSA. This may include the student’s biological or adoptive parents, a step-parent, or a student’s spouse.

The new FAFSA is student-driven, which means the answers provided by the student will determine who is a contributor. 

Contributors will each log in to the FAFSA separately with their own FSA ID account. Then, they will complete their own section and answer questions that only they can view. All contributors must provide their financial information and will be required to sign the FAFSA.

In order to be eligible for federal student aid, students and contributors must provide consent to have their federal tax information (FTI) transferred directly into the FAFSA from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Providing consent even applies to contributors who don't have a Social Security Number, didn't file 2022 taxes, or who filed taxes outside the US.

Tax data will be automatically transferred directly from the IRS into your application, streamlining the process and reducing the number of questions you’ll be required to answer. Please be aware that you, and your FAFSA contributors, will not have the ability to see or modify the FTI when completing the FAFSA online. 

The student and all contributors must provide this consent and approval on the FAFSA in order to be eligible for federal student aid.

Dependent students, whose parents are separated or divorced, will see a change in how they determine which parent needs to be a contributor on the FAFSA.

In past years, your FAFSA parent was the parent you lived with most in the past 12 months. From now on, the parent, or contributor, on your FAFSA will be the parent who provided the most financial support for you in the last 12 months, no matter which parent you lived with.

Instead of manually entering the number of individuals in your household for the upcoming academic year, the number of people in your/your parent’s household will align with the number of dependents listed on your/your parent(s)’ U.S. tax return.

If this number changes after filing the tax return, you can indicate this update directly on your FAFSA. Note that you, and your contributors, will not have the ability to see the family size as it is part of FTI that transfers from the IRS.

You will still be required to report the number of family members in college, however, it won’t have the same impact on your financial aid eligibility, as it had in the past. Therefore students with siblings in college may see a change in their eligibility for federal aid as compared to prior years.

Please be aware that there may be options for you/your family to report costs associated with the additional family members enrolled in college. More information about this and other appeals to come. 

If you are unable to provide parental data due to either unusual circumstances or other situations including homelessness or risk of homelessness, your FAFSA will be processed with a provisional independent status.

This allows for your financial aid, including the Federal Pell Grant, eligibility to be determined upfront. OSFA will then follow up with you to submit additional documentation and complete the processing of your financial aid offer.

The update to the 2024-2025 FAFSA required an overhaul of many pieces of the FAFSA. 

For a complete list of known issues, including potential workarounds, please refer to the 2024-25 FAFSA Issue Alerts page. This page will be updated regularly by the Department of Education.

At this time, here are some of the errors and issues that the Department of Education is working to resolve:

Errors for Students:

• A student who indicates they do not have a social security number is unable to continue or start a new form after they exited before the “State or legal residence” question.
• A student is unable to proceed past the first student identity section when the mailing address section is blank.
• Graduate students, who are not Pell-eligible, are being told they are eligible for the Federal Pell Grant via FAFSA Submission Summary.

Errors for Contributors (parent/spouse):

• A student’s or contributor’s (parent/spouse) signature is removed after they return to a saved FAFSA form.
• Parent/Contributor without a social security number will need to manually enter in tax/financial information.

We know the updates to the FAFSA have presented challenges for not only our students but also their parents and supporters. If you are unable to submit your FAFSA due to one of these issues, we encourage users to continue returning to your application on studentaid.gov periodically to watch for updates or contact Federal Student Aid directly.