A student loan strategy that actually fits your loans

Most repayment advice is too generic to trust, because it ignores the one thing that drives every decision: the mix of federal and private loans you actually hold.

Start with the avalanche method

Pay the minimum on every loan, then throw every spare dollar at the loan with the highest interest rate. When it is gone, roll that payment into the next-highest. Mathematically, the avalanche saves you the most interest of any payoff order, because you are always killing your most expensive debt first.

But federal loans usually go last

There is a crucial exception. Even when a federal loan has a slightly higher rate, it often belongs near the back of the payoff line, because its protections (income-driven repayment, forgiveness, the ability to pause) are worth keeping, and its fixed rate is usually modest. The aggressive payoff energy is best aimed at high-rate private loans, where there is no protection to preserve and the interest is the whole story.

The 2026 policy changes to factor in

The federal landscape shifted: the SAVE plan has been eliminated, the new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) launches July 1, 2026, and IBR is the surviving legacy income-driven plan. If you are on the federal side, your choice of repayment plan now matters as much as your payoff order.

Put it together

A real strategy is not one rule, it is a per-loan call: protect the federal loans and pick the right plan, attack the costly private ones, and check refinance rates only where it pays. That is the part a generic article cannot do for you.