The Brief

Topline:

Why it matters: The city has been retrofitting one of its wastewater treatment plants in Van Nuys to recycle water for drinking in order to boost water supplies in the face of long-term water shortages driven by climate change and overuse. Now, if approved by City Council, the plant will be able to recycle water to its full capacity, producing enough water for a half-million Angelenos as soon as 2028. It’s part of a broader effort to recycle all of the city’s water by 2035.

Effects beyond L.A.: Officials and supporters of the project say the expansion also can help restore water levels in Mono Lake in the eastern Sierra, where L.A. gets about 2% of its water. The Mono Lake Kootzaduka'a Tribe and water advocates have long fought for a landmark 1994 decision by state water regulators to limit L.A.’s water diversions from the lake to restore it to healthy levels, but those targets still have not been met.

What’s next: The construction project on the Tillman plant is expected to be completed by 2027, with water deliveries beginning as soon as 2028. As for the cost to ratepayers, the recycled water will be cheaper than what the city currently imports from the Colorado River and the Sierra Nevada. The L.A. City Council will next need to approve the board’s recommendation.

Go deeper: 

• LA has big plans to recycle more water. Why the city says it’s going to take decades to do it
• California’s new water recycling rules turn wastewater to tap water. What this means for you
• How ocean creatures tell us the complicated story of LA sewage treatment 
• I drank recycled sewage to get a taste of SoCal's water future

On a clear winter night in 2019, Gerardo Gaona drove a white Ford Expedition to a homeless encampment in Pico-Union, stepped out, entered a tent and fired six rounds from his 9mm handgun.

Hector Valey, 24, was hit twice. Court records say he managed to make it out of the tent, dying nearby soon after midnight Feb. 23. Jorge Perez was struck in his right shoulder — his life likely spared only because the Smith & Wesson aimed at him ran out of bullets. Gaona got back into the SUV and sped off.

Two weeks earlier, on Feb. 9, police had responded to a shooting at the same encampment that left one person wounded. The same Expedition was spotted at the scene, and bullet casings were eventually linked back to Gaona’s pistol.

Gaona, now 30, was convicted of first-degree murder and premeditated attempted murder in 2022. He was sentenced to a minimum of 82 years in prison. The court described him as “a borderline serial killer who hunted homeless people in his neighborhood.”

He's not the first person in Los Angeles to target the city's most vulnerable. Unhoused people living here have been strangled, stabbed, set on fire and bludgeoned with baseball bats — often in plain view.

An investigation by LAist and The LA Local found that at least 278 of the city’s unhoused residents have been shot and killed since 2015, according to an analysis of data from the Los Angeles Police Department. Once rare, gunfire is now the primary means by which killers take the lives of unhoused people in the city.

However, our analysis of records from the L.A. County Medical Examiner shows that’s an undercount. We found an additional two dozen fatal shootings from 2024 and 2025 that do not appear to be included in LAPD data. Medical examiner records are not exhaustive either — the office estimates that about 20% of deaths among the county’s unhoused population aren’t reported to their department.

In 2014, the earliest year analyzed in this investigation, there were no killings of this kind. In 2022, there were 60. This surge reflected a national peak in gun violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, which experts have attributed to fewer social supports, rising gun sales, and an increase in joblessness, mental illness, and substance abuse. Following a decline, LAPD data show that fatal shootings of unhoused people stayed nearly the same between 2024 and 2025, even as overall homicides in the city last year fell by 19%.

The oldest shooting victim found in the medical examiner’s records was a 69-year-old man who, in 2024, was shot six times in an alley near the intersection of Interstates 105 and 110. The youngest was shot seven times, mostly in the back, during a drive-by in Florence-Graham that same year. He was 15 years old. Neither victim appears in LAPD data.

The LAPD didn’t return a request for comment about the gaps in its shooting data.

“This data underscores why Mayor Bass is so zealous about bringing people inside from the street and encampments,” reads a statement from Mayor Karen Bass’ Office. “When people are left on the street — which was the de facto City policy before Mayor Bass was elected — they are exponentially more likely to encounter violence.”

Drug overdoses, coronary heart disease, and traffic accidents remain overwhelmingly the most common causes of death among L.A.’s unhoused population. But fatal shootings have become a persistent danger facing the “unsheltered” portion of this population — the nearly 27,000 men, women and children who sleep on sidewalks, in tents or cars, under bridges, and other places not meant for permanent human habitation. It’s the biggest population of its kind found anywhere in America.

Unhoused people are both the perpetrators and victims of homicide. But LAPD homicide data shows they are far more likely to be the victims of violence: From 2015 through 2025, unsheltered people accounted for 16% of all murder victims in the city, despite making up less than 1% of Angelenos.

“Homeless people face, arguably, the highest victimization levels of virtually anyone in society,” said Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Among homicides in 2025 with unhoused shooting victims, the LAPD made arrests in all 16 cases, according to our analysis of department data. This is a dramatic change from 2023 — before the department changed its data collection methods — when the LAPD cleared just 48% of such cases by arrest for unhoused victims, and 74% for housed victims.

The LAPD did not return a request for comment about this significant change in arrest rate.

Court records and people who spoke with LAist and The LA Local attributed these shootings to gangs and the dangers of the underground drug economy. Other sources and legal proceedings point to a rise of “predators,” “outsiders,” or “vigilantes” — people who kill because they view unhoused people as easy targets and less than human.

There are “people who actually go out and target the homeless as some kind of badge of honor,” Levin said.

“As the numbers of people who are homeless rise, the number of vigilante activities have risen with it,” said Andy Bales, who ran the Union Rescue Mission shelter on Skid Row for nearly 20 years.

Throughout most of the country, a person’s housing status isn’t collected upon their death, which means that national data on the shootings of unhoused people is currently unavailable. However, advocates say this kind of violence is on the rise around the U.S. And with a growing share of Americans losing shelter, more people are at risk.

Predators and self-styled vigilantes

For decades, individual news stories have revealed the violence facing unhoused Angelenos. A UPI story from 1986 begins:

LOS ANGELES – Thousands of homeless street people are being urged to spend their nights in Skid Row missions or 'huddle together for safety' against a killer who has shot four men as they slept in lots and alleys.

The shooter, dubbed The Skid Row Slayer, would kill a total of 10 unhoused men before dying by suicide nine days after the story was published.

Years later, two elderly women took out life insurance policies worth millions of dollars on two unhoused men — before killing them in staged hit-and-runs in 1999 and 2005.

“They went out of their way to target men who had nothing,” said Bobby Grace, a deputy district attorney who prosecuted their case.

The perpetrators of the so-called Black Widow Murders were sentenced to life without parole.

Gaona went on his shooting spree in 2019, according to court documents, “without any apparent provocation or reason other than ridding his community of its most vulnerable members.”

More recently, the LAPD arrested two people in May 2022 for allegedly shooting and killing a 69-year-old unhoused double amputee while he slept in his wheelchair outside of a McDonald’s in Gramercy Park. A jury found one of them not guilty at trial in 2023. The second person, Rubi Anguiano-Salazar, shot a 67-year-old unhoused woman, who survived, at a bus stop in the same neighborhood four days later. In 2025, Salazar was sentenced to 42 years to life in prison for one count of first-degree murder with a gun and one count of willful, deliberate, and premeditated attempted murder.

Over a span of 72 hours in November 2023, Jerrid Joseph Powell allegedly prowled the nighttime streets of Los Angeles, sneaking up on unhoused men and shooting them. One man was asleep on a couch. Another was pushing a shopping cart. The third was resting on the sidewalk. They all died. During that period, Powell allegedly killed another man in L.A. County who was not unhoused. Beverly Hills police arrested Powell a few days later in connection with that shooting after his car was identified from surveillance footage.

Powell has pleaded not guilty to four counts of murder. Criminal proceedings have been suspended while his case works its way through hearings to establish if he is mentally competent to stand trial, according to the district attorney’s office.

Last August, authorities say Vincent Wolf approached an RV parked outside his apartment building in Sylmar and shot and killed Travis Harker, 29. Wolf has pleaded not guilty to murder and is awaiting trial. Police said Wolf, 23, had vented frustration on social media earlier that month about homelessness and “corrupt politicians” failing to address the issue.

Benyamin Sadeh, an LAPD detective who investigated Harker’s killing, said he worked on a different fatal shooting in 2023 that seemed motivated by a similar sort of resentment.

“The victim wasn’t homeless, but he appeared to be,” Sadeh told LAist and The LA Local.

Sadeh said he’s not surprised LAPD data shows shootings of unhoused victims have remained consistent as homicides in the general population decrease.

“It’s a big problem for us,” Sadeh said. “A lot of people focus on the impact [of gun violence] to our communities, but it's also affecting people that are experiencing homelessness.”

Gisselle Espinoza is an LAPD commander and the department’s homeless coordinator. She disagrees.

“I don't have anything to suggest that there's a trend or a pattern with people pulling weapons on [unhoused people],” she said.

Numerous people living outdoors who spoke with LAist and The LA Local described having guns pulled on them as a regular occurrence.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman’s office doesn’t track the housing status of victims or people accused of crimes, an office spokesperson said in an email. “Our more than 800 prosecutors remain deeply committed to seeking justice and supporting every victim impacted by crime,” the statement added.

Most suspected shooters are housed

Jeff Wenninger spent 33 years in law enforcement, much of it with the LAPD, and he sees things differently from Espinoza. His résumé includes a stint in the department’s Rampart Division, which encompasses MacArthur Park, a hub of homelessness in L.A. He estimates that half of the attacks on unhoused people he saw there were of the predatory sort — but that applies only to instances where the assailant was caught, allowing their identity to be known.

“For lack of a better term, I’ll just call them ‘outsiders’ that are victimizing the homeless and seeing them as less human,” said Wenninger, who now provides expert witness testimonies and security consulting.

His estimate tracks with LAPD data, which includes the housing status of suspected criminals. An analysis of department records by LAist and The LA Local shows that in the killings of unhoused people, 83% of suspected shooters from 2015 through 2025 were housed.

“That's pretty concerning. I think law enforcement would want to say otherwise, that it's homeless on homeless,” Wenninger said.

Between 2015 and 2025, the number of unsheltered people in Los Angeles increased from roughly 18,000 to nearly 27,000, a rise of about 52%. The city is the epicenter of America’s homelessness crisis: It encompasses roughly 10% of the nation’s entire unsheltered homeless population, even though only about 1% of people in the country live here.

Local, county, state and federal levels have poured billions of dollars into addressing homelessness in the L.A. area, but progress has been minimal. Homeless advocates acknowledge that the persistence of this crisis has led to compassion fatigue, resignation, resentment, and dehumanization among some Angelenos. This loss of patience has at times expressed itself as protests, angry local council meetings and anti-homeless Facebook groups.

Jeremy Rosenprinz is a member of the volunteer-led homeless outreach group Ktown For All, and he’s familiar with such negative sentiments. “The problem is that when you live your life in public, there is nowhere for you to go. And so we're seeing people at their absolute worst,” he said.

Jeremy Rosenprinz, a member of Ktown For All, stands outside of Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Koreatown on Jan. 10. The all-volunteer group meets most Saturdays to deliver supplies to unhoused people in the neighborhood

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Agya K. Aning

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LAist and The LA Local

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Academic research shows that some people believe their unhoused neighbors deserve to suffer, and a 2024 study in Los Angeles County provides a glimpse into their struggles: 32% of homeless respondents said they experienced discrimination daily in the past month, while 16% said they had experienced violence. To be clear, these kinds of indignities can come from other unhoused people. They also come from housed individuals who’ve slashed tents and thrown their possessions into dumpsters.

“Being unhoused — it's like exile, basically,” Rosenprinz said. “When people are marginalized and demonized in the media and by our government, then it sets off a certain type of person who thinks that, 'Oh, like, maybe I'm even doing a community service to do violence against these people,'” he said.

“I think there's entire portions of the population who do not see the unhoused or people living in poverty as human beings,” said Soma Snakeoil, the co-founder and executive director of The Sidewalk Project, a street-based harm reduction organization.

Snakeoil co-founded the group in 2017. It’s led by and lends aid to unhoused, drug-using, sexual assault survivor, and sex worker populations. The Sidewalk Project operates a drop-in center on the southern edge of Skid Row, where there’s always someone standing watch behind a heavy rolling gate. With its cozy couches and multi-colored murals, the interior resembles an easygoing hostel. It serves as a haven for cisgender and trans women, offering them meals, hygiene kits, self-defense classes and a place to simply rest.

The Sidewalk Project helped Reilly, who was previously unhoused and preferred not to give her first name, get housing in 2021. They brought her on as an employee the year before that, and as the group’s community ambassador her roles include harm-reduction outreach, wound care, and violence interruption.

Reilly said she left an abusive household in the 1980s and made her way as a sex worker, living out of various hotels. She’s been attacked numerous times, she said, including a drive-by pellet gun shooting to her ankle that required 106 stitches. From the 15 intermittent years Reilly spent unhoused, she said she’s known several dozen unhoused people who’ve been shot and killed.

“If they have this need or desire to kill people, then this is the place to come,” Reilly said. “Because we're expendable.”

Reilly, who was formerly unhoused, stands before a mural at The Sidewalk Project, a drop-in shelter for unhoused cisgender and trans women in Skid Row on Jan. 9. The organization brought her on as its community ambassador and helped her get housing.

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Agya K. Aning

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LAist and The LA Local

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Gang threats in encampments

The Union Rescue Mission is a shelter that operates a faith-based recovery program in Skid Row. Men and women receive aid there in various forms, including detox, therapy, parenting classes, vocational training, and help finding housing.

Andy Bales watched the population of Skid Row rise dramatically during his 20-year tenure, which ended in 2023. Over the years, he said he witnessed countless acts of violence, including being within earshot of a fatal shooting. He said he also saw gangs set people’s tents on fire for crossing them or failing to pay debts.

“Skid Row is the worst man-made disaster in the US,” Bales said.

A great deal of being unhoused revolves around simply staying safe, so those living outside often band together to look after one another. However, homeless encampments can be ripe for violence and exploitation, including being used as cover for drug-dealing operations.

Detective Sadeh said “a lot” of the violence he’s seen was related to the drug trade, including gangs who wanted unhoused drug users to buy from them exclusively.

Eunisses Hernandez, a City Council member representing parts of Los Angeles with large unhoused populations, said she’s aware of violence in and around encampments.

“I have certain encampments where there's regular [gang] shootings,” Hernandez said.

Identifying the exact degree of gang involvement in these crimes is difficult. In 2020, the LAPD withdrew from CalGang, a statewide database used to track gang affiliations, after an internal audit found that officers were falsifying records. Other law enforcement agencies in the state are still prohibited from using records generated by the LAPD, which made up about a quarter of the data.

Court records show that assumed rival gang affiliations can be a significant factor in violence against unhoused people.

On a late night in early 2018, two members of the Avenues gang were out looking for rivals and eventually made their way to a homeless encampment in Montecito Heights. They entered a tent where they found Daniel Duarte and Douglas Garido. The intruders asked the two men where they were from, meaning, What gang do you belong to? Duarte said he was from Pasadena, and Garido said he had no affiliations. Suddenly, one of the men shot Duarte, 31, in the back of the head. He died at the scene, while Garido, 34, was shot twice and survived. According to court records, neither of them belonged to any gang.

A year later, Bradley Hanaway was sleeping under bleachers in North Hollywood when three members of MS-13 approached him, asking to see his tattoos. Mistaking one for the symbol of a rival clique, court records state, one member shot Hanaway almost instantly, killing him. He was 34 years old.

Guns on the street

California’s gun laws, long considered the country’s strongest, require proof of residency to legally own a firearm — a difficult task for anyone living on the streets of L.A. Further, federal law prohibits gun possession for anyone convicted of a felony or involuntarily committed to an institution for a mental disorder or severe substance use. During the city’s 2025 point-in-time count — an annual tally of unsheltered people — 26% reported having a serious mental disorder, while 30% said they had a substance abuse disorder.

Still, there are plenty of ways to obtain a firearm illegally, such as stealing, bringing them in from states with less restrictive gun laws, and straw purchasing, which involves buying a gun on someone else’s behalf.

“Everybody has a gun, mostly people who are not supposed to have guns,” Detective Sadeh said. “They’re out there, they are easily obtained, and they change hands very quickly.”

From 2015 through 2025, the LAPD seized more than 80,000 illegal firearms, according to its annual crime report. Last year, it recovered 8,650, over a thousand more than in 2024. The department has reportedly recovered guns from encampments, among other locations.

Sadeh said that ghost guns — untraceable firearms manufactured at home, assembled from kits or some combination of both — are also prevalent in the city. Last year, the LAPD recovered 876 of them, down from a peak of 1,921 in 2021.

LAist and The LA Local spoke to an unhoused woman living in Koreatown, who said that gun ownership among people on the streets was common in her neighborhood.

“On this street alone, on the average, there's four or five guns, right here from that block to that block,” said the 57-year-old woman, who said she was an Army veteran and former police officer. She said there were gunshots almost every night, mostly coming from gang activity.

“Between Alvarado [Street] and Vermont [Avenue], what, there’s four active gangs right here? Well, five if you include LAPD,” she said.

The veteran, who wasn’t comfortable giving her name, already knows her way around firearms.

“Even though we're not supposed to [have guns],” she said, “I'm considering one, ya know?”

Zackery "Turdle" Melton was shot and killed in Venice in April 2025.

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Courtesy Melton's family

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The LA Local

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Solving the murders

On April 2, 2025, Zackery Melton, 28, was shot and killed in Venice while defending a friend from her abuser in Westminster Dog Park. Melton, known to most as “Turdle,” was unhoused and beloved by the wider Venice community.

Melton’s heroism apparently made quite the impression: His father, Mark Melton, said detectives told him they were going to solve his son’s case because he was “one of us.”

Detectives spent more than five weeks tracking down Melton’s killer. LAPD arrested Tyrone Jones, 46, on May 9, 2025. Just over a year later, at the end of a 16-day jury trial, Jones was convicted of first-degree murder and seven other charges. His probation and sentencing hearing is June 18.

Given that about half of the fatal shootings in our data went unsolved, the response to Melton’s death appears to be an exceptional one.

(Stay tuned for Melton’s story, coming later this week.)

Unhoused Angelenos say getting justice in general, much less for serious crimes, is difficult. Their personal anecdotes about interacting with the LAPD often include being ignored, not believed, disrespected or treated like a criminal.

Current LAPD detectives and Wenninger, the former lieutenant, said that unhoused people’s reluctance to come forward can make it difficult to solve their murders. They also pointed to staying in touch with unhoused people throughout the legal process, which can take months or years, as another complication. These factors may partially explain why the department’s clearance rate of fatal shootings of unhoused people can be substantially lower than that of housed victims — but only partially.

Wenninger said that officers would sometimes treat unhoused people as a nuisance, wishing not to interact with them because of their lack of cleanliness. Some also didn’t see the point in helping unhoused people.

“The department answer is that ‘every life matters,’” he said. “But in reality there's a finite amount of resources, and determinations have to be made on where those resources are going to be spent.”

When investigating homicides with unhoused victims, Wenninger said officers would sometimes say “no human involved.” The infamous phrase came to light during the Rodney King saga of the early ‘90s, when transcripts of chatter between LAPD officers revealed that they used the shorthand “N.H.I.” to refer to crimes with both Black victims and perpetrators. It’s been used for crimes involving sex workers as well.

Espinoza, the LAPD homeless coordinator, said she had never heard of that phrase. “And if somebody ever did say that, then they would be held accountable.”

She said the department takes all crime victims seriously.

“We provide the best service, whether the person lives in an affluent area, or whether it's someone that lives in Skid Row,” Espinoza said.

Wenninger also remembers LAPD officers questioning why they should care about delivering justice for unhoused victims if their families don’t care.

Karen Webb, Melton’s mother, has heard such comments many times. “And every time, it stabbed me in the heart,” she said. “Like, he was 28. What was I supposed to do?”

After his death, she reached out to the press and took to social media, commenting under numerous and sparse local news stories about her boy.

“I had to change that narrative,” Webb said, “because though he was homeless, he was so much more than just that.”

Additional reporting by Jordan Rynning

On July 1, a host of new student loan changes from last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will kick in, including the end of a short-lived Biden-era repayment plan, the start of two Republican-designed repayment plans and strict new borrowing limits for some students.

There's a lot to parse, and not every change will impact every borrower. So we've designed this story to make it easy to find the guidance that does apply to you, or to the borrower in your life.

To get started, click on the student loan status that best describes your situation below:

• You're enrolled in the SAVE repayment plan

• You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and no plans for new loans

• You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and future loan plans

• You're a new undergraduate borrower taking out loans after July 1

• You're a new grad school borrower taking out loans after July 1

• You're in graduate school right now. Do the new loan limits apply to you?

• You're enrolling in a short-term job training program and you'd like help paying for it 

• You're interested in Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)

• You're a parent interested in helping your student pay for college

You're enrolled in the SAVE repayment plan

After a few contentious years of paused payments and a legal battle that made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden-era Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan is officially ending.

If you're one of the more than 7 million borrowers still enrolled in SAVE — the most flexible and generous income-driven repayment plan — you may have already gotten a notice from the U.S. Department of Education warning you that you'll have to switch plans soon. Well, you'll likely be getting another note from your loan servicer, starting a roughly 90-day clock.

If you don't act, the department says it will enroll you in one of the least flexible repayment plans.

Financial aid experts have told NPR that this effort, beginning July 1, to push millions of borrowers into repayment and into new plans that will cost more than SAVE, could exacerbate an alarming rise in student loan defaults – especially considering that many borrowers enrolled in SAVE precisely because their low incomes qualified them for a $0 monthly payment.

What are your repayment plan options? You've got lots. Keep reading.

(Back to the top.)

You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and no plans for new loans

Whoever you are, whatever your story, whether you enrolled in the SAVE plan or not, you're in good company: About 43 million Americans hold about $1.7 trillion in federal student loan debt.

As long as your loans were issued before July 1, and you have no plans to borrow any more money, you'll have quite a few repayment options, including one brand new plan. They are:

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Jenn Live for NPR

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Standard Repayment Plan

• How it works: This plan divides your loan balance into equal monthly payments (plus interest, of course) over a 10-year period. If your loans have been consolidated, they may be spread out over a longer period, up to 30 years. 
• The upside: Monthly payments are all the same, predictable as the sunrise. 
• The downside: Payments can be pretty high relative to income-based plans. 
• A note for borrowers: Republicans also created a new version of this Standard plan, called the Tiered Standard Plan, but it's not available to borrowers with only older loans. 

Graduated Repayment Plan

• How it works: Monthly payments start out low, but as the name suggests, they increase every two years and are spread out over a 10-year period. As with the Standard plan, borrowers with consolidated loans may qualify for a longer repayment term.
• The upside: It allows borrowers to start small, and, ideally, as your payments increase over time, so too does your income and your ability to keep up with them.
• The downside: Over time, your payments could grow, even double in size.

Extended Repayment Plan

• How it works: Monthly payments can be either fixed or graduated, but there's one big difference. Payments can last up to 25 years, instead of the common 10 years. 
• The upside: Twenty-five years makes for smaller monthly payments.
• The downside: You're paying a lot in interest over the long run. 

The plans above do not take a borrower's income into account when calculating a monthly payment. So-called income-driven repayment plans do — and come with a few other perks:

Income-Based Repayment (IBR)

• How it works: If your loans are older than July 1, 2014, your monthly payments are based on 15% of your discretionary income and spread over a 25-year period. Anything left after that is forgiven. For loans taken out after July 1, 2014, monthly payments will be based on 10% of discretionary income and spread over 20 years before the remainder is forgiven.
• The upside: Loan forgiveness!
• The downside: Twenty to 25 years repaying a loan is a long time.  

Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR)

• How it works: ICR bases monthly payments on a larger share of a borrower's discretionary income — 20%. Borrowers also have to make payments over a relatively long period of time — 25 years — before they can qualify for forgiveness.  
• The upside: Up to now, for Parent PLUS borrowers, this was often the only income-driven repayment plan they could qualify for.
• The downside: It will generally cost more each month than its fellow income-driven plans.
  
• A note for borrowers: This is arguably the least generous member of this plan family. It's also being phased out by 2028, so, if you do enroll, you'll have to change plans again in two years.

Pay As You Earn (PAYE)

• How it works: PAYE's terms are similar to what newer IBR borrowers enjoy: Payments are based on 10% of discretionary income over a 20-year period, then the remainder is forgiven.
• The upside: Switching to PAYE, for now, could mean two years of lower payments.
• The downside: Like ICR, Republicans voted to shut down PAYE by July 1, 2028; so you'll need to switch plans again within two years.   

Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP)

• How it works: RAP bases monthly payments on a borrower's adjusted-gross income (AGI). The more you make, the higher your monthly payment. For example, a borrower earning $30,001-$40,000 can expect a monthly payment around $75-$100. Earn $50,001-$60,000 and it jumps to $208.34-$250.  
• The upside: RAP waives any monthly interest that exceeds the plan's monthly payment. It also comes with a principal-matching payment that makes sure lower-income borrowers see their loan principals go down each month. And, for parents and caregivers, it allows you to slash $50 from your monthly payment for every dependent in your household.
• The downside: Unlike IBR, ICR and PAYE, RAP requires that borrowers be in repayment for 30 years before any remainder is forgiven. By then, there'll be little if any debt left. And, a nerdy but important facet: This plan isn't indexed for inflation, which means modest income gains could trigger big increases in monthly payments. 
• A note for borrowers: This is the new kid on the block for legacy borrowers. You can enroll starting July 1.

We recommend using the department's Loan Simulator — or maybe this one, developed in partnership with The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit — to see which plan makes the most sense for you.

You're a current borrower with old (pre-July 1) loans and future loan plans

So, you've already got some loans, and you're planning to take out more. The good news/bad news is you won't have a lot of repayment options to choose from.

Any borrower who takes out a loan on or after July 1 will be limited to the two new repayment plans created in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: The Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) or the…

Tiered Standard Plan

• How it works: Like the original Standard, the new Tiered plan divides a borrower's principal and interest into equal monthly payments over a set period. Again, predictable as the sunrise. What's different is that that period of time grows with the size of the debt.

  • Owe less than $25,000 — repay over 10 years.
  • Owe $25,000-$49,999 — repay over 15 years.
  • Owe $50,000-$99,999 — repay over 20 years.
  • Owe $100,000 or more — repay over 25 years.
• The upside: A longer repayment period for larger balances means smaller payments.
• The downside: Longer repayment periods also mean, well, a long-term relationship with debt.  

You're a new undergraduate borrower taking out loans after July 1

Hello, fresh face! Welcome to your higher education adventure. Let's be honest, you're probably not thinking much about your repayment options yet. You're headed to school, and we wish you well.

As you get on your way, here are a few things to keep in mind: Lending limits haven't changed for undergraduate borrowers. Dependent/independent undergrads are still limited to borrowing:

• $5,500/$9,500 in their first year
• $6,500/$10,500 in their second year
• $7,500/$12,500 in the third and subsequent years

In total, dependent/independent undergrads can borrow up to $31,000/$57,500.

When it does come time for repayment, you'll likely have just two options to choose from: Either the Repayment Assistance Plan or the Tiered Standard Plan.

You're a new grad school borrower taking out loans after July 1

Many of you probably have undergraduate loan debt, though hopefully not too much. And for the moment, you're probably not thinking about repayment since you're headed back to school. We wish you well!

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Jenn Liv for NPR

)

Still, there are a few things to keep in mind: As of July 1, lending limits change dramatically. Until now, grad students could borrow up to the cost of their program. Your program costs $40,000 a year? You could borrow $40,000 every year. Soon, though, you'll be limited to $20,500 a year and a total of $100,000. That's a big difference.

Only a small group of so-called "professional" degrees will be exempted from these lower limits and qualify instead for $50,000 a year in loans, or $200,000 in all. These degrees fall into 11 categories: chiropractic, clinical psychology, dentistry, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, podiatry, theology and veterinary medicine.

You can learn more about these grad school loan caps at this link, including why they have many advocates worrying about an eventual shortage of nurses and other healthcare providers.

You're in graduate school right now. Do the new loan limits apply to you?

This is complicated. The Education Department is making some exceptions for grad school borrowers who are in the middle of their higher education adventures. You may be exempted from the new loan limits if:

1. You were enrolled by June 30, 2026.
2. By then, you also have to have received a loan for your program.
3. And you have maintained enrollment in the same program, at the same school.

If you do qualify to be exempted from the new limits, the department's website says you can lean on the old loan limits — i.e., borrow up to the cost of your program — for either three academic years or the difference between how long your program is supposed to last and how long you've already been enrolled, whichever number is smaller.

You're enrolling in a short-term job training program and you'd like help paying for it

One of the biggest changes going into effect on July 1 is an expansion of the traditional Pell Grant for low-income students to include what's known as short-term workforce training.

A Pell Grant is essentially free money from the federal government – unlike a loan, it does not need to be paid back. For 2026-27, the largest grant a student in a traditional program can qualify for is $7,395. Awards for short-term training will likely be prorated for the program's length.

This expansion of Pell is meant to help workers learn new skills to become, say, a certified nursing assistant or a welder. For the first time, students will be able to get federal help paying for these training programs, which last between eight and 15 weeks.

The first, most important step you need to take to qualify is to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). You can't get a Pell Grant without it.

One huge caveat: This expansion is so new that many current training programs may not qualify. And because it comes with some pretty strict federal guardrails, some never will.

It will take states and the federal government some time to figure it all out, so you'll need to be patient. And while you wait, fill out the FAFSA!

You're interested in Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)

Greetings (aspiring) public servants.

The good news for you is that the program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) still exists. It's a policy quid pro quo: If you pledge to work full-time (at least 30 hours a week) in public service — as a nurse or police officer or school teacher, etc. — for 10 years while making 120 monthly payments toward your student loans through a qualifying repayment plan, then whatever debt is left will be forgiven by the U.S. government.

Which plans qualify for PSLF?

In the income-driven category, IBR, ICR, PAYE and the forthcoming RAP all qualify.

We recommend using the department's Loan Simulator to see which plan makes the most sense for you, i.e., which plan has you paying the least over the next decade.

The other question you may have is: Wait! Didn't I see stories about how the Trump administration is changing the PSLF rules, maybe making it harder to qualify?

Good memory! Yes. Here's one of those stories.

Effective July 1, the department says it can deny loan forgiveness to workers whose government or nonprofit employers engage in activities with a "substantial illegal purpose." The job of defining "substantial illegal purpose" belongs to the education secretary. Last year, the department offered this short list: "terrorism, child trafficking, and transgender procedures that are doing irreversible harm to children."

In late 2025, several large cities, including Boston and Chicago, sued over the rule change, worried that the administration might try to use a city government's politics to exclude its public workers from PSLF. The fight over this rule is very much still playing out, so stay tuned.

You're a parent interested in helping your student pay for college

The Parent PLUS program will see a few key changes take effect July 1. Here's what to know:

• First of all, there will be new limits on how much parents can borrow. Parent PLUS loans will be capped at $20,000 per year, per dependent child, with an aggregate cap of $65,000 per dependent. That's a big change from the previous rules which allowed PLUS loans up to the cost of a program. 
• Repayment is also seeing big changes. Parent PLUS borrowers who take out a loan after July 1 will no longer qualify for any plan that bases their monthly payment on their income. They will only be able to use the new Tiered Standard Plan. This also means future Parent PLUS borrowers will no longer be able to qualify for either a plan that offers forgiveness after a set period of time or for PSLF. 
• For Parent PLUS loans that were taken out before July 1, borrowers' best bet for a long-term, income-driven plan is IBR, but only if you consolidate your loans first, make one payment on the less generous ICR plan (which, like PAYE, will be phased out in 2028) then switch to IBR. If this is news to you, it may already be too late. The Education Department's website recommends borrowers start this process at least three months early to make sure their new consolidated loans are issued before the July 1 deadline.

Edited by: Nicole Cohen and Nirvi Shah

Copyright 2026 NPR

California is almost done counting ballots — but the key word is almost. Election officials are now moving onto the ballot “curing” phase and are sending notices to voters for verification.

If you received a letter in the mail, it doesn't automatically mean your ballot has been rejected, contrary to misinformation circulating online. Ballot curing is a normal part of California’s vote-verification process and a safeguard to make sure you actually cast your mail-in vote.

Here’s what you should know about how it works and steps to take to make sure your ballot gets counted.

What is ballot curing?

If your ballot needs to be cured, that means the mail-in envelope has been flagged for a signature issue. That could be because it looks off (that is, it doesn’t match what’s on your state record) or it’s missing entirely.

Your county registrar will send you a letter that asks for your signature to attest that you returned the ballot and that it’s your name on the envelope. (The mismatched signature and unsigned envelope letters can be separate in some counties — but L.A. County combines it.) You’ll also have to provide your address. These steps are required under state election code.

You can reply to that notice via phone, email, mail, fax or in person. If you’ve received a letter in Orange County, follow the steps here. For L.A. County, follow the steps in your letter. Here's an example of what the combined letters look like for both counties:

The privacy of your vote is protected during this process. The state election code requires the ballot return envelope to stay sealed until the registrar can verify the voter’s signature. LAist has also confirmed this with the L.A. County registrar’s communications manager Mike Sanchez and Aimara Freeman, a spokesperson for Orange County's registrar.

Why do I need to do it?

Your registrar is giving you an opportunity to fix a discrepancy, which helps ensure only registered voters cast ballots.

It’s important to cure your ballot by the deadline because your vote won’t count without it. The registrar must receive it no later than 5 p.m. June 24.

L.A. and Orange counties have about 24,000 ballots to cure as of Wednesday, according to the California Secretary of State.

A very small portion of ballots gets rejected each election statewide. The Secretary of State reports that 0.93% of ballots — or 122,480 votes — were not counted in the 2024 general election, for example, mostly because signature issues weren’t resolved.

How are signatures verified and flagged?

Signatures are compared to the ones in your voter registration record. Because of California’s Motor Voter program, that could come from the DMV. If you’re curious what your local registrar has, you can ask to review the signatures in your file.

We cover in detail how the verification process works here, but this is the gist:

• In L.A. County, a device compares your signatures first. If it’s mismatched or missing, a human then reviews it.
• In Orange County, humans do the comparison and review.

Three election officials have to agree that a ballot signature is “significantly” different from the one on record for it to be pulled, according to state code. To verify your signature, officials consider spelling, signature slant, letter characteristics and possible explanations for discrepancies — for example, trembling hands or rushed writing.

The ballot gets pulled for curing when officials challenge it — that is, they determine it needs extra verification. State law requires notices for this to be sent by first-class mail by the next business day after a challenge.

Second notices may also arrive by phone or email. You can choose a preferred secondary method through the Secretary of State’s “Where’s My Ballot?” tracking service.

As a reminder, Tuesday was the last day for ballots to arrive by mail, as long as it was postmarked by Election Day. So if you haven’t been notified that your ballot’s been counted yet, you should check on it.

Here’s where to do that for L.A. County. Orange County has a similar tool that you can find here.