The safety net for federal student loan borrowers is about to be sharply overhauled.

The domestic policy bill that was signed into law recently makes radical changes to the way Americans will pay for college, and could make access to higher education more difficult. It will also fundamentally alter the way borrowers repay their debts, which can easily spiral into tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes more.

Starting next summer, borrowers taking out fresh loans will have two new repayment plans to choose from, while at least a half-dozen existing programs will be extinguished, including the most affordable option, the Biden-era plan known as SAVE. The nearly eight million people in that plan will soon need to figure out their next-best option.

The system is being restructured at a crucial moment in the ongoing student loan saga. Only 44 percent of the nearly 35 million borrowers who should be making payments actually are, according to calculations by Mark Kantrowitz, an expert on student loans. And nearly six million borrowers were reported to the credit bureaus as being late at the end of April, according to TransUnion, sending their credit scores plunging.

The new repayment plans are unlikely to resolve those issues on their own, but they will, at the very least, give borrowers a sense of what their options are — an assurance they’ve gone without for more than a year.

The loan system has been in a state of flux for the past six years, and borrowers have been swept up in the confusion. At the end of a 42-month pandemic-related pause on payments, the Biden administration opened the SAVE plan in August 2023. But less than a year later, Republican-led legal challenges halted the plan, and borrowers’ payments were frozen. This year, a related court ruling questioned the legality of other longstanding income-driven plans, temporarily halting all applications.

Now, the current repayment plan menu is being dismantled and replaced.

Further complicating the situation, the overhaul will begin not long after the Education Department’s staff has been cut in half as part of the Trump administration’s slashing of the federal bureaucracy.