Public service employee pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness after 120 qualifying payments. Income-driven repayment, employer certification, forgiveness tax planning.
SL-01 is the 120-qualifying-payment archetype: public-service borrowers tracking PSLF employment certification under 34 CFR §685.219, navigating SAVE / PAYE / IBR plan choice, and counting toward a forgiveness event that is tax-free under IRC §108(f)(1).
SL-01 exists because PSLF is the most procedurally complex student-loan-forgiveness pathway in the system and most lender, servicer, and personal-finance products handle it incorrectly. The eligibility test under 34 CFR §685.219 requires 120 qualifying monthly payments while employed full-time by a qualifying employer (501(c)(3) nonprofits, federal/state/local government, certain not-for-profit organizations providing qualifying public services), and forgiveness was uniquely made tax-free under IRC §108(f)(1) — distinct from the §108(f)(5) ARPA exclusion for other federal forgiveness programs which sunsets after 2025. The PSLF Employment Certification Form (PSLF ECF) must be submitted by both the borrower and the qualifying employer, and the historical implementation under MOHELA (and prior servicers) generated a denial rate the OIG and CFPB have repeatedly criticized — the 2022 PSLF Waiver and the 2023 IDR Account Adjustment specifically retroactively counted payments that the original rules excluded. Income-Driven Repayment plan choice — SAVE (currently under litigation and partially enjoined), PAYE (closed to new enrollees July 2024), IBR (old and new variants), and ICR — drives the monthly payment that counts toward the 120, and the optimization is non-trivial: lower payment maximizes residual forgiveness amount, higher payment finishes the principal sooner if PSLF eligibility is uncertain.
The structural story is a low-to-moderate income early-career household: median income $62k, median net worth $59k, median liquid net worth $39k. Every household carries student loans and credit cards; only 1 of 12 is a homeowner. The down-payment-saving goal is present in 11 of 12 households but flagged off-track because the IDR-payment cash flow is squeezed by the 10–15% discretionary-income calculation and the simultaneous savings goal can't accelerate. Borrowers cluster in education, public-health, government, and 501(c)(3) advocacy industries — the qualifying-employer test concentration is by design.
SL-01 differs from SL-02 (general IDR enrollee) by the active PSLF posture — the borrower is intentionally maximizing forgiveness probability rather than minimizing total interest paid. From SL-03 (Parent PLUS) it differs by being the primary borrower on the household's own education debt, not a parent on a child's loan. The diagnostic is the qualifying-employer + 120-payment-tracking + tax-free-forgiveness combination.
Aggregated across the 12 SL-01 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Daniel and Emily are the classic PSLF-track MFJ file: education and healthcare industries, $64k combined gross income, $127k of total liabilities concentrated in federal student loans. The diagnostic is the MFJ-versus-MFS decision under the IDR-payment rule — filing MFS removes the spouse's income from the discretionary-income calculation in some plans (PAYE, IBR), lowering the IDR payment and maximizing PSLF forgiveness, but loses the joint-filing tax brackets and the §221 student-loan-interest deduction. SAVE's spousal-income exclusion logic added another wrinkle before the injunction. This file finds the bug in tax-software flows that compute MFJ-versus-MFS without modeling the downstream IDR-payment impact across the remaining PSLF horizon.
Every SL-01 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Student-loan servicing and refinancing platforms use SL-01 to test PSLF eligibility analysis, ECF generation, qualifying-payment counter logic, and the SAVE-administrative-forbearance-doesn't-count-toward-PSLF edge case introduced by the 2024–2025 litigation. Tax-software platforms use it for MFJ-versus-MFS optimization with the IDR-payment downstream impact, the §221 student-loan-interest-deduction phaseout, and the IRC §108(f)(1) versus §108(f)(5) forgiveness-tax-treatment fork. Personal-financial-management products (consumer advice-content platforms and refinancing brokers) use SL-01 to validate that they do not recommend private refinancing to a PSLF-eligible borrower — which forecloses PSLF irreversibly. HR and benefits-admin platforms use it for employer PSLF assistance programs and employer-side ECF certification workflow.
SL-01 specifically excludes borrowers without qualifying public-service employment — general IDR enrollees belong in SL-02. Parent PLUS borrowers, even those at qualifying employers, are SL-03 by design because Parent PLUS loans require ICR (the worst IDR plan) and a double-consolidation workaround to access better plans. Borrowers in the older Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) who never consolidated to Direct Loans are not PSLF-eligible without first consolidating, and the consolidation resets the 120-payment counter (subject to the 2023 IDR Account Adjustment retroactive credit) — this transitional population overlaps SL-01 and SL-02. Private student loans are not PSLF-eligible at all; households whose debt is private-only belong in SL-02 or F-01. Borrowers who left qualifying employment and returned (gaps in qualifying-employment history) are present but not over-sampled.
Income and student-loan-balance bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to NCES Baccalaureate and Beyond longitudinal data, Department of Education Federal Student Aid portfolio summary statistics, and the CFPB Student Loan Servicing Annual Report. Industry concentration in education, healthcare, and government reflects the qualifying-employer concentration of real PSLF candidates. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the v3 corpus is FROZEN — priors above describe synthesis intent rather than auditable distribution fits. SAVE plan parameters reflect the regulation as published but the litigation status (partial injunction, administrative forbearance) is a live policy state not pre-baked into the household records.
SL-02 is the general IDR enrollee without PSLF eligibility — the 20/25-year forgiveness horizon with the §108(f)(5)/(post-2025-uncertainty) tax bomb is the diagnostic.
SL-03 is the Parent PLUS borrower who is the parent rather than the student. Parent PLUS restricts IDR access to ICR only without a double-consolidation workaround.
F-01 is the new-graduate tech worker. Reach for F-01 when the borrower's debt is being aggressively repaid on the 10-year Standard plan rather than maximized toward PSLF.
A-05 is the early-career healthcare professional. Some A-05 households are also PSLF candidates; reach for SL-01 when the diagnostic is PSLF tracking rather than the broader healthcare-professional profile.
SL-01 — PSLF Candidate (Nonprofit / Government) represents borrowers pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness under 34 CFR §685.219: 120 qualifying monthly payments while employed full-time by a qualifying 501(c)(3), government, or public-service employer, with forgiveness tax-free under IRC §108(f)(1).
The 12 shipped SL-01 households have a combined gross income median of $62,153 (25th–75th: $48,783–$68,727). Median net worth is $58,775 with $39,314 in liquid net worth — typical of early-career public-service households with high student-loan balances and minimal home equity (only 1 of 12 owns).
The household profiles are consistent with active IDR enrollment but specific plan choice (SAVE vs PAYE vs IBR vs ICR) is a downstream attribute. The SAVE-administrative-forbearance-doesn't-count-toward-PSLF behavior introduced by 2024–2025 litigation is a live policy state that products consuming the corpus should overlay rather than rely on as pre-baked.
SL-01 borrowers work at qualifying public-service employers and are tracking the 120-payment PSLF horizon. SL-02 borrowers may be on the same IDR plans but lack PSLF eligibility, facing the 20- or 25-year general forgiveness horizon with a potential tax bomb under non-PSLF §108(f) rules.
Yes. The corpus is structured so that MFJ households can be tested against the IDR-payment downstream impact of MFS filing (lowering the IDR payment in some plans, increasing PSLF residual forgiveness). The §221 student-loan-interest-deduction phaseout under MFS filing is part of the same trade-off.
No. The shipped v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift confirmed 2026-05-09). Improvements land in a future v4 release with per-archetype golden fixtures in CI.
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