The graduate financing gap OBBBA created, program by program.
Federal loans no longer reach the published cost of nearly every graduate and professional program we tracked.
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Median annual financing gap by program type
Each bar is the median first-year cost of attendance for an out-of-state student living off campus.
Teal is what federal Direct Loans can cover, the new annual cap. Amber is the gap. Hover any bar for the spread and evidence detail.
What this measures & full methodology
Who this applies to. The new caps apply to new borrowing. Students who received any Direct Loan for their program before July 1, 2026 and remain continuously enrolled keep prior-law borrowing, including Grad PLUS, for up to three academic years or their remaining program length, whichever is shorter. The Index measures the position of the incoming class.
About the data. We manually collected 1,233 official cost-of-attendance figures, one per program, from each school's own published budget. The Index is a sampling: selected schools within 11 degree types, not every U.S. graduate program; many programs aren't covered yet. All figures assume an out-of-state student living off campus. We add programs and refresh budgets over time.
How the coverage figures reconcile. 1,213 programs show a first-year gap above $0. Two more fail the fully-covered test: Kaiser Permanente's Tyson School of Medicine (2025–26 tuition-waived budget $39,736; no budget gap, but not Title IV) and Albany Medical College's PA program (first two 7-month budgets under cap; 12-month Year-3 budget $69,400, per AMC's 2026–27 FA guide). That gives 1,215 of 1,233 not fully covered. Across validation and a second adversarial audit, 16 programs were reclassified: 14 that had passed on single-semester "first-year" budgets (each budget corrected), Kaiser (Title IV), and Albany PA (later-year budget). KPSOM students currently have no federal Direct Loan access at all; we score it on the budget-vs-cap test only, which understates its federal gap.
Methodology. The Index is a manually collected sampling, not a census. We hand-gathered 1,233 official cost-of-attendance figures from a 1,411-program research list across 11 degree types: 961 with exact 2026–27 full-COA budgets, and 272 using the school's official published 2025–26 budget where no 2026–27 budget had been published as of July 19, 2026 (used unadjusted and labeled). All figures use the out-of-state (non-resident) rate and off-campus housing where schools distinguish; grant assumption $0. Federal caps per OBBBA, effective July 1, 2026: $20,500/yr graduate, $50,000/yr professional. Professional/graduate classification follows the Federal Student Aid list (July 10, 2026): pharmacy, optometry and podiatry are professional under the rule's own long-standing list; PA and DPT are professional under the interim court-stay implementation and may change as litigation proceeds; MBA is graduate. Programs are counted at the campus/location level where schools publish separate budgets (e.g., DO branch campuses), which is why DO n=69 exceeds the ~45 accredited colleges. The universe skews toward large, nationally recruited programs, so medians will run above national all-program medians; the 44 MBA rows are full-time two-year programs (part-time and online excluded), so the national MBA median will be lower. "Fully covered" requires every school-defined academic-year (loan-period) budget at or under the applicable annual cap, at a Title IV school, the basis on which federal annual limits actually apply. Published academic-year budgets often exclude summer terms, so over-cap shares are a floor. At public programs, resident-rate budgets run meaningfully lower; treat public-program medians as the out-of-state ceiling.
1,233 program-level official COA sources (institutional financial-aid pages and published budgets, recorded in our source file) · Federal Student Aid loan-limit FAQ (May 2026) · FSA professional-degree program list per court order (updated Jul 10, 2026).
Cite: The Juno Gap Index v1.1, July 2026 · joinjuno.com/gap
Juno is a marketplace, not a lender · How Juno is paid ↓
One in three of the 1,233 programs in the Index leaves a gap above $50,000. Per year.
Share of programs whose annual gap exceeds each threshold (program-weighted, not enrollment-weighted; categories overlap). The median program's maximum annual gap is $38,494 at sticker price, before scholarships, grants, or assistantships.
└ 46 programs exceed the applicable cap by more than $100,000 — in the first year alone.
The >$0 rung counts programs with a positive first-year budget gap (1,213).
1,233 programs. Federal loans fully cover at most 18.
Each square is one program: its official cost of attendance vs. the federal loan cap that replaced Grad PLUS on July 1.
Fully covered = every school-defined academic-year (loan-period) budget at or under the annual cap, at a federally-certified (Title IV) school, the basis on which federal annual limits actually apply.
Of the 20 first-year budgets under the cap, two fail the full-coverage test (one on federal-loan eligibility, one on a later-year budget); details in the methodology ↓
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