OBBBA Changed the Loan Rules: Grad PLUS Is Gone and Parent PLUS Is Capped. Does Your Packaging Know?

ApolloSRM’s loan-limit engine applies the OBBBA 2026 rules in the live award estimate by default. A graduate student’s PLUS maximum is now zero. A dependent undergraduate’s Parent PLUS is capped at $20,000 a year and $65,000 in total per dependent, net of what the parent has already borrowed. The same engine still enforces the subsidized and unsubsidized annual and aggregate limits by dependency and grade level, the way it always has.

A stale loan limit is an over-award waiting to happen

These changes are not cosmetic. One borrowing path, Grad PLUS, is gone, and another, Parent PLUS, now has a hard ceiling it never had before. If your packaging still assumes a graduate student can close the gap with Grad PLUS, or that Parent PLUS runs all the way to cost of attendance, you will write award letters you cannot disburse as written. That means an over-award, a clawback, and an uncomfortable call to a family that already planned around the bigger number.

What the engine does for a 2026 borrower

For a graduate student it zeros PLUS and tells you why. Graduate borrowing has been unsubsidized-only since 2012, and now there is no PLUS to top it off. For a dependent undergraduate it caps Parent PLUS at the new annual and aggregate ceilings, counts what the parent has already borrowed toward the aggregate, and flags the moment the cap binds. If the parent is denied PLUS, the student moves up to the independent unsubsidized limits, exactly as the rules allow. And because the rule year is explicit, you can still model a pre-2026 scenario when you need to compare.

What is a rule and what is an input

The statutory caps live in the engine and are dated in the code, so the next time Congress moves them it is a one-line change, not a rebuild. The student’s scheduled awards and prior borrowing are the inputs you supply. The engine computes the most a student may borrow, and your packaging policy then holds subsidized aid to remaining need and unsubsidized to remaining cost, so the award letter reflects both the federal limit and your school’s policy.

Fly the current rules

The fastest way to fail a 2026 file review is to award against 2025 rules. With Grad-PLUS elimination and the Parent-PLUS caps applied by default, the number on the award letter is the number you can actually disburse. No course correction mid-flight, no clawback after the family has already planned the trip.