How New Graduate Loan Limits Will Affect Individual Colleges
Check out our online Graduate Loan Limit Impact Explorer at peer-center.org to estimate the impacts of new graduate loan limits by state, institution, program of study, control, and more.
In July of 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), a sprawling bill that, among other provisions, sought to reduce federal expenditures on the student loan programs – including by placing strict new caps on borrowing for graduate programs. The new limits are expected to have substantial effects on whether and how Americans access advanced education. Under current policy, graduate students are eligible to borrow up to $20,500 per year in unsubsidized loans, plus additional loans under the Graduate PLUS program up to the full cost of attendance (as determined by each college) for the program. Under the new law, though, the Graduate PLUS program will be eliminated entirely for new borrowers, and limits are set at $50,000 for professional programs like law and medicine, and $20,500 for all other graduate-level programs.
Past work from the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research (PEER) Center has illustrated the impact of these new limits, which are set to take effect in July 2026 for new borrowers. These impacts have been challenging to understand for specific states, institutions, or categories of institutions, though, as they have primarily relied on national data.
In this analysis, we use data prepared by the Department of Education’s Office of the Chief Economist for research purposes and released in January 2025. These data, which are compiled from federal administrative data on all federal student borrowers, report information on the distribution of the annual borrowing of graduate students by program of study and institution, for academic years 2016 through 2023. We use the data for academic years 2020 through 2023 to estimate the share of borrowers and share of loan volume that exceeds the new OBBBA loan limits.*
With these data, we are able to estimate the impacts of the new loan limits for particular institutions across various dimensions, including the state where the institution is located, programs of study, Historically Black Colleges and Universities and minority-serving institutions, and more. We encourage users to further explore the information using the Graduate Loan Limits Explorer tool available on our website or the full data file made available (Appendix B: Underlying Data on Graduate Loan Limits; and Appendix C: Codebook).
Key Takeaways
States will see varying impacts across their institutions. A handful of states (California, Oregon, New York, Nevada, and Vermont) and Washington, D.C. have at least 40 percent of their graduate students borrowing in excess of the new limits; whereas some states (Arizona, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Utah) have 15 percent or fewer.
Some programs of study will be especially affected — including some that qualify for larger annual limits under OBBBA. Fields like medicine, law, and dentistry qualify for higher ($50,000) annual loan limits for “professional” programs under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But borrowing levels are currently so high in those fields, they will still fall among the most-impacted programs of study by the amount of federal loan volume that will be cut off. Other highly impacted fields include MBAs, physical therapy programs, and physician associate/assistant programs.
Several Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) will see substantial impacts. Most Historically Black Colleges and Universities and minority-serving institutions have about the same share of students borrowing above the OBBBA limits as do other institutions that are neither HBCUs nor MSIs. At some HBCUs and MSIs, however, the share of students borrowing above the limits is more than half of graduate students.
Foreign medical schools have especially high rates of borrowing above the new OBBBA graduate loan limits. Foreign medical schools are among the largest consumers of Grad PLUS loans today, and several are among the top programs affected by the new limits of any program in our analysis, in any field of study and any type of institution.
*In many cases, data showing the share borrowing above those limits is missing due to small sample sizes; and the originally released data do not perfectly align with the limits ultimately adopted for professional programs. In those cases, we impute information on the amount of borrowing above the limits wherever possible. Readers should note that the imputation process involves error, especially at the most granular levels—e.g., for particular programs at particular institutions—and so results here should be viewed as estimates rather than as definitive. For details on the data and how we estimated borrowing relative to the new limits, see Appendix A: Methodology in the report.
