How to Complete the PSLF Employment Certification Form

What's up everybody? It's Megan Landris from Student Loan Planner, and this is going to be a how-to video on how to complete the Employment Certification Form. So the Employment Certification Form is for those who are pursuing PSLF, Public Service Loan Forgiveness. So you either work for a nonprofit, a 501c3 entity, or a government entity, and you are pursuing the Loan Forgiveness Program that will forgive your loans after you make 120 qualifying payments. So the Employment Certification Form is how you tell the student loan system that you are pursuing the program, and it's how they confirm that your employer is eligible, that you have the right types of loans, and what it does is it goes back and it counts up your payments historically, all the way back until when you had started with that employer. So this form, very important. We recommend submitting this one time a year. You do not have to, but we think it's a good practice because they don't continuously qualify payments as time goes on. They'll recognize that you've made payments, but they won't qualify them until they have a new Employment Certification Form on file because they don't know if you're still there. So why would they qualify a payment until they know that? So this form, very important, great way to keep a pulse on where you're at with your payment count as time goes on. It's also a great way to catch any issues or problems before you're at the finish line, and it's much easier to fix a problem that happened within the last year than it would be fixing a problem when you're sitting at the 10-year mark when it happened nine years ago or eight years ago. So I think it's a great proactive thing to do over time. So with that, let's jump into how to do this. I'm going to share my screen, and we will jump straight into that. All right. So this, what I'm pulling up is Federal Student Aid, studentaid.gov. This is the federal hub for all things federal student loans. This is where you can recertify your income. This is where you can consolidate your loans. You can confirm who your loan servicer is, and this is also where you can start the process to complete the employment certification form. This is not your loan servicer, but this is your servicer's boss. Now, the employment certification form, you can find this at studentaid.gov slash PSLF, and there is a PSLF help tool. So another way to find it, I'll show you if you hover over where it says Manage Loans, make sure to log in. If you haven't logged in in a while, you'll have to reset your password, or if you don't have a login, you'll have to create one. But once you're in, you'll hover over where it says Manage Loans. You'll click Public Service Loan Forgiveness right below it. Then you'll go, it'll pull up just details about PSLF. You're going to go to the very first resource under the PSLF resources in this bluish green box where it says Public Service Loan Forgiveness Help Tool. So click on that, and it'll take you here. And it talks about the PSLF Help Tool, and what you're going to need before you do this. One is you're going to need your EIN number for your employer. So the EIN number is the tax ID number that the IRS recognizes your employer by. You can find this on your most recent W-2 if you were employed by them last year, and you got a W-2 to file your taxes with this past year. It's on the W-2, usually in the first couple boxes. If you just started, or if you do not have your W-2, you may have to give your HR a call, or your company or entity a call, or talk with your HR department in person when you go in next. And what you'll need to ask for is the EIN number. And the next question this application is going to ask you for is your start date and your end date, if applicable. So if you've only had this one job, the end date is not applicable, of course. But you do need to know your start date, and they want to know the month, the day, and the year. So you need to know that down to the day. So that would be a great question, just to just double check with HR, make sure you have the exact date. What we see sometimes happen is you plug in the wrong date in this form. It prints this form out, you take it to the employer for their signature, and the employer lines through something that's inaccurate and writes something else. And that now is probably going to get rejected, so you might have to redo the form. So this will save you some time if you get this information in advance, and that might just be, or might just start with a quick call to HR. So double check your start dates, your end dates for your current employer, and each employer you've worked with in the past that could be eligible for PSLF, so it was a nonprofit or a government entity. If you're not sure, double check, triple check, and just make sure. And you wanna go as far back as either you graduated and had the loans and had made payments on the loans, or you wanna go back as far as October 1st, 2007. And that date is significant because that's when the program had started. So those are the pieces of information you need in advance. While you have someone on the phone or while you're talking to somebody at your employer about this, go ahead and ask who you need to send it to for their signature as well, because this form does need to be signed. Usually there's a point person that is in charge of doing that, so ask that question as well. So once you have all that information written out, organized, then you will log into this PSLF help tool, and you will plug and chug that information. You'll add the employer. It'll tell you right off the bat if it's eligible. If it's not eligible, it'll say that it's not eligible. And if they don't know if it's eligible. So sometimes this happens if you're working for an entity that is new or that someone has never submitted an employment certification form before for them. So sometimes happens, but it might say something to the tune of likely ineligible. And don't let that scare you. If you think it's eligible, either way, submit the form anyways. They just probably don't have it in their system already. So you could be the first that puts it into the system. So once you go through here, you'll complete the document. It will print out or it will generate a PDF of this employment certification form here. You will still have to print this, or you'll have to email or scan this to your employer for their signature. But what it has done is it has pre-filled all of this information for you. You will have to sign as the borrower. And there's a place under the section four for the employer signature. The signature needs to be either a physical signature where they've taken a pen and signed it. Or if it's a digital signature, it needs to be one that was drawn with somebody's finger or their mouse. It cannot be a typed signature or a font that's made to look like a signature. It has to be one of those two, either physically signed or drawn with one of those electronic signature processes. Other signatures will get denied and you'll have to redo this so that hopefully can save you some time. Now, you can, like I said, you can email it to your employer. They can send it back to you. That's totally fine. It can be just sent to and from electronically. The signature just has to be either physical or drawn. Now, when you get this back, when it's signed, you'll have, if you've had multiple eligible employers in the past, you'll have multiple page twos here where it has the employer details. You'll also have multiple pages if you had different employment periods. So sometimes I see this happen where someone started at a job for a couple of years, but left for a year and came back to that same job. You'll have to complete two different forms to capture those two different employment periods correctly and both of those would need to be signed. And if you had different employers, of course, those would need to be signed by their respective employer entities. So this is the form it generates. That's what you need to get signed. Then the instructions as of the date of this video, which is June 21st, 2022, says to mail this to either, to FedLoanServicing. So you can either mail or fax. This is if you don't already have FedLoanServicing. If you already have FedLoanServicing as your servicer, then you can upload this document to your online portal. That is a little faster, probably recommended if you already have them. But if you don't, if you're at a different loan servicer, you will have to mail or fax. If you're mailing, I would recommend mailing certified to make sure it got there okay. Why do we need to send it to FedLoan? This is kind of a complicated question right now, but FedLoanServicing has been in charge of PSLF historically. The Department of Education delegates that duty to one company and historically it's been FedLoan. Now we're at June 21st, 2022. They announced that they are stepping down as of July 1, 2022. So that means that the new servicer is taking over who is called Mojila. Mojila will collect these documents in the future. And maybe by the time you're listening to this video, the instructions have been updated to say, send to Mojila. But the company that's in charge of PSLF, that's who receives these documents. It prints these instructions out for you when you complete the employment certification form. So just go by the instructions that you're provided. Now, once you submit that, you'll get some kind of confirmation that they've received it. It takes, they're saying right now one to three months for them to update your payment count. And you'll be sent a formal letter that says, hey, here's the payment count that we've got for you. And that gives you a good picture of how far along you are towards the 120 payments. So that concludes my how-to video here. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, put them down in the comment section below and we will get back to you. And thank you for hanging out with me today. Again, I'm Megan from Student Loan Planner. If you need help navigating your student loan plan and putting this together, schedule a consultation with us. That's what we do one-on-one. We do one-hour consultations to really help dive deep into your repayment plan, help you put together an action plan with those next steps and how to tackle this. So you're not alone. You've got us as a resource if you'd like to schedule a consultation or put a question in the comment section below. But thanks for hanging out with me. You have a good day today.