Once both contributors submitted we immediately got an email with subject “We’ve Received Your FAFSA Form” which had an estimated SAI and Pell, and something called DRN. So something was calculated, but I don’t know if that means it is “processed”, as I’m not sure what you mean by that term. (And it certainly isn’t transmitted to schools.) I also don’t know whether or not the thing we received was a “FAFSA submission summary”, and I don’t know if we can remove and add schools yet (to do more than 20).
Ours was submitted on 1/2 and we received the SAI email with the index immediately. When we log in to see the status it says “in review”. The question is, how long does it take for the “in review” to change to processed. Those who wish to amend their FAFSA need to wait until it processes before going back in.
There has been some chatter and on the FAFSA form itself that it would be 3-5 business days before submissions would process. However, there has also been chatter that the processing won’t actually be done until end of January.
Based on past experience, it’s processed once you receive the confirmation with the DRN and SAI. At that point, you should be able to log into your FAFSA and make changes, if necessary. You should be able to list new schools at that point, BUT … because things are so screwy right now, I almost hesitate to recommend doing that. I would encourage you to call FAFSA helpline to ask before doing that. It would be fine to add schools, but removing them might be another story right now.
Has anyone who got a confirmation been able to log back into their FAFSA yet?
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Here is what is on the FAFSA official website.
- After all sections of the online FAFSA form are completed and submitted, the student will receive a confirmation email noting their submission date, their estimated Student Aid Index (SAI), and estimated Federal Pell Grant eligibility. However, the student will not receive a FAFSA Submission Summary until FSA processes the FAFSA, beginning in late January.
People who do need to amend (not me) have been told they can’t get into FAFSA to make changes until the original submission is processed.
At first people were thinking the processing time was 3-5 days (I think this thread mentioned it early on) but now people are thinking it won’t be until end of January.
Again, lots of speculation.
Ugh.
I just logged in. In the " My Activity" section it says
“2024–25 FAFSA Form: Parent Contributor
In Review”
When I click on that I get a page saying
“Status Tracker
FAFSA Form Started
…
2 FAFSA Form Submitted
…
3 FAFSA Form Processed”
So in one place it says "In Review” and in another place it says "FAFSA Form Processed”.
(it seems this happened quickly, if not instantly, as it was submitted yesterday.)
This is our first time so I don’t know what to read into the wording.
Can you view your FAFSA information? Did you (assuming you are parent) create your ID recently, or did you do it before?
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FSA ID was created months ago. I can see information in the account that I quoted above. But numbers like SAI are not in the account (that I can find) - that came in an email.
But if you go to the FAFSA link and click Access Existing Form, then log in & click on the form … do you see the various sections (demographics, financials, colleges, etc)?
If you look closely, the circle for step 3 (FAFSA form processed) is still grey, and not filled out.
We see the same thing, and took it to mean that step 3 is not complete.
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Same here.
Under Step 2 it has the date (1/2)
Step 3 is still greyed out.
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So it sounds like at this point, no one is able to fix anything that they might have done incorrectly - and if you did do something incorrectly that you don’t know about, you won’t know until they tell you at some point in the future. I hope that students will have the ability to add schools soon. Do be sure to watch for emails from Federal Student Aid.
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No, I don’t see any of that information there.
Yes, ours looks just like yours with the grey circle, and I wondered about the “greyed out” interpretation, but if they wanted to be clear, then instead of saying literally “FAFSA form processed” they could word it more clearly such as “FAFSA form not (yet) processed”.
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Dumb question here - I know most (all?) schools have not updated NPC’s for 24-25, but I’m curious - for the NPC’s that ask if you know your EFC, is it an equal substitute to use the SAI number for that field?
This isn’t critical by any means, I was just helping S24 to fill out a comparison spreadsheet and wanted to re-run some of the NPC calculations because apparently I didn’t save all of them originally.
The SAI is the new term for EFC, so you can use it. I would be concerned, though, that the NPC has not been updated for 2024-25 if they use the term EFC … so the information you get may not be correct.
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My son has been trying to create a FAFSA account since it opened. He gets to the third page of the registration (address and phone number) and it won’t let him advance - no alert of a mistake - just won’t allow him to move to the next page. Is anyone else experiencing this?
(He’s also used another computer and operating system and the same problems)
This is a previous explanation post by @kelsman - you can scroll up to find the back and forth.
Here is another issue that perhaps explains what some parents are experiencing with addresses (issues are being worked on by FSA and will eventually be fixed - workarounds allow the user to be able to proceed now):
Description: If a user invites a parent or spouse who does not already have an FSA ID account to contribute to a 2024-25 FAFSA form and that contributor attempts to create an account before the contributor’s Social Security Administration (SSA) Match changes from Pending to Full Match, the contributor receives no error message explaining this situation and is prevented from proceeding past Step 3 of the Create an Account page on StudentAid.gov .
Workaround: The parent or spouse contributor can delete the Mailing Address entered on the Create an Account page and then proceed. The contributor’s address can be added to the account via Settings after the account has been created. Alternatively, the contributor can wait until the SSA Match status is Full Match and try again to create an account.
NPCs that use EFC as an input are pretty useless, and changing that input to SAI won’t help. If an NPC isn’t directly asking for income, assets, and other key details, then it can’t reliably estimate a net price.
I am having the same problem with my sons account - we are in California