Every federal borrower eventually stares at the same menu: Standard, Graduated, Extended, and (since July 2026) the Repayment Assistance Plan. The plans look similar in a servicer's dropdown and behave nothing alike on an amortization table. Here's each one priced on the same $35,000 balance at 6.52%, the 2026-27 undergraduate rate, plus the rule change that quietly removed two of your choices.
The 2025 law that created RAP (P.L. 119-21, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's student loan title) redrew the menu. If all your loans were first disbursed on or after July 1, 2026, you pick between exactly two plans: Standard and RAP. Graduated repayment, Extended repayment, and the older income-driven plans closed to new enrollment. Borrowers with pre-July 2026 loans are grandfathered and can keep what they have or move among the older plans, which is why all four still matter.
Standard is a level payment sized to clear the loan in 10 years. On $35,000 at 6.52%, that's $397.77 a month, $47,733 total, and $12,733 of interest. No plan beats that interest figure, because no other plan gives interest so little time to work. If you can afford the payment, this is the one; if you can afford more than the payment, prepaying on Standard beats stretching to Extended every time.
Graduated starts you at roughly half the Standard payment (never below the monthly interest) and raises the payment every two years so the loan still retires in 10 years. The pitch is "low payments now, raises later," and it worked when federal rates sat at 3% to 4%. At 6.52% the arithmetic turns hostile: your $198.89 starting payment barely dents the $190.17 of interest stacking up each month, so principal barely falls for two years. To catch up, the schedule compounds to $316, then $503, then $801, then $1,274 a month in years nine and ten, and the total cost reaches about $74,259. That's roughly triple Standard's interest and worse than 25-year Extended. Graduated still fits a resident, clerkship, or commission-based earner with a contractual raise coming. For everyone else, RAP does the same job with a floor instead of a cliff.
Extended stretches the loan to as long as 25 years, fixed or graduated, and requires more than $30,000 in federal loans. On our $35,000 it delivers a $236.76 payment, $161.01 below Standard. The cost of that relief is $36,028 of interest over the life of the loan versus $12,733, a $23,295 difference. Extended is a cash-flow tool, not a savings tool, and since the 2026 changes it's also a limited-time artifact: only pre-July 2026 borrowers can enter it.
The Repayment Assistance Plan sets your payment as a percentage of adjusted gross income on a sliding scale from 1% to 10% ($10 flat up to $10,000 of AGI), divided by 12, minus $50 per dependent, floored at $10. At $60,000 of AGI with no dependents, that's 5%, or $250 a month on any balance whatsoever. Two features do the heavy lifting: interest your payment doesn't cover is waived (the balance can't balloon), and whatever remains after 360 qualifying payments is forgiven. The catch is 30 years of recertification, and payments rise with your income, so a thriving career can push the RAP payment past Standard's. Our RAP payment calculator shows the full bracket table.
Enter your loans once and see first payment, final payment, total cost, and eligibility under the 2026 rules, side by side.
Open the Repayment Plan Comparison →| On $35,000 at 6.52% | Standard | Graduated | Extended | RAP @ $60k AGI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Payment | $397.77 | $198.89 rising to $1,274.37 | $236.76 | $250.00 |
| Term | 10 yrs | 10 yrs | 25 yrs | up to 30 yrs |
| Total paid | $47,733 | $74,259 | $71,028 | varies with income |
| Total interest | $12,733 | $39,259 | $36,028 | unpaid interest waived |
Switching plans is free and generally allowed yearly, but two things bite. Leaving an income-driven plan can capitalize unpaid interest into your principal, instantly raising every future calculation. And if you hold pre-July 2026 loans, walking away from Graduated or Extended may be one-directional, since the plans no longer accept new enrollees. Run the switch through the repayment plan comparison calculator first, and confirm treatment of past payments with your servicer if you're chasing forgiveness. For the mechanics of interest itself, our student loan interest calculator breaks down the daily accrual, and the payoff calculator prices extra principal against these same schedules.
For new borrowers, effectively yes. The 2025 law that created the Repayment Assistance Plan restricts loans first disbursed on or after July 1, 2026 to Standard or RAP. Graduated and Extended closed to new enrollment. Borrowers who already held loans before that date are grandfathered and can keep or choose them.
Mathematically, shorter always wins: interest has less time to compound. On $35,000 at 6.52%, the 10-year Standard plan costs $12,733 of interest while the 25-year Extended plan costs $36,028. The lower payment is the right call only when your budget genuinely can't carry the higher one or your income is temporary and low, which is exactly what RAP is designed for.
Graduated repayment must still pay the loan off in 10 years. When the starting payment barely covers monthly interest, almost nothing goes to principal early on, so the later steps have to make up the difference. At 2026 rates near 6.5%, that pushes the final two years above 3 times the Standard payment. At older 3% to 4% rates, the same schedule ended near 1.5 times Standard, which is where that rule of thumb came from.
Eventually, yes. Whatever balance remains after 360 qualifying monthly payments, which is 30 years, is forgiven, and interest your payments don't cover is waived along the way so the balance never grows. The 10-year Standard plan clears the same balance in a third of the time, so RAP forgiveness matters most for borrowers whose income keeps payments low for decades.