Throughout the first year of the Trump Administration, more than 3.6 million new student loan borrowers have fallen into default—a new default every 9 seconds. This startling estimate, based on new government data, marks an unprecedented default crisis nearly three times worse than the year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, when over 1 million borrowers defaulted on a student loan—then equivalent to a new default every 26 seconds.
Protect Borrowers’ analysis shows that by the end of 2025, student loan borrowers had defaulted on debts totaling more than $92 billion—bringing the total number of borrowers whose debts meet the legal definition of a student loan default to nearly 9 million people nationwide. Nearly two-thirds of the borrowers who defaulted during the Trump Administration—more than 2.6 million people—live in states that President Trump won in the 2024 election.
Explore the numbers below:
Download the data set here.
Read the Letter: Labor Unions, Civil Rights Groups, and Borrower Advocates Letter to ED Urging Admin to Halt Plans to Resume Garnishing Defaulted Borrower Wages
Read the Press Release: New Analysis Finds That a Student Loan Borrower Defaulted Every Nine Seconds in 2025, as Trump Restarts Wage Garnishment
Sources
Protect Borrowers’ analysis of the most recent government data on the number of federal student loan borrowers in default. Department of Education Student Loan Portfolio (Portfolio by Loan Status, FY2025, Q4), Department of Education Student Loan Portfolio (Default by Location), FY2025 Q4).
Note: The above data visualization includes a state-by-state estimate of the total number of student loan borrowers that are currently in default on a federal student loan as of Q4 of FY2025, as well as the total number of borrowers who fell into default over the course of the first year of the Trump Administration. Our calculation is based on new data showing that 3.62 million people were more than 270 days past due on a student loan owned by the federal government, totaling $92.6 billion. The Higher Education Act defines “default” as being more than 270 days past due, unlocking the full suite of forced debt collection tactics available to the Secretary of Education, including Administrative Wage Garnishment (20 USC 1085(l)). We then added this 3.62 number to the 5.2 million number of borrowers currently in default, according to government data. Protect Borrowers estimates that nearly 9 million people (8.882 million) now owe loans that meet the legal definition of default under the Higher Education Act.
The data visualization also includes a state-by-state breakdown of the total volume of defaulted student loan debt and the volume of newly defaulted student loan debt over the course of the first year of the Trump Administration. To develop these estimates, Protect Borrowers analyzed new government data released by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) in December 2025 showing the number of defaulted borrowers in each state and projected the number of newly defaulted borrowers and volume of newly defaulted dollars for each state, assuming the distribution of newly defaulted borrowers and newly defaulted dollars mirrors the distribution of the existing stock of borrowers and dollars in default as reported by ED. Protect Borrowers then identified every state that awarded electoral votes to the Trump-Vance ticket in the 2024 presidential election and added the volume of newly defaulted borrowers and the volume of newly defaulted dollars that corresponded to these states.