If you have embarked on a career as a teacher and have taken out federal student loans in order to finance your education, you may qualify for the Teacher Loan Forgiveness (TLF) program.
The TLF has strict requirements and is only available for Direct Loans and Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program loans. The main requirement of the program is that you must teach at a low-income elementary school, secondary school, or educational service agency for five (5) consecutive years.
In order to check if your place of work qualifies as such, you will need to use the Teacher Cancellation Low Income (TCLI) Directory. The TCLI Directory is published yearly by the U.S. Department of Education. Your school or educational service agency needs to be listed in the directory for the years in which you were employed.
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NOTE: You may only apply for the program after you completed the five (5) year teaching requirement.
The only exceptions to the requirement of being listed in the TCLI Directory are for elementary and secondary schools that are: (a) operated by the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), or (b) operated on Indian reservations by Indian tribal groups under contract with the BIE. These schools are qualifying schools for the purposes of the TLF program, even if they are not listed in the TCLI Directory.