Can Private Student Loans Be Discharged in Bankruptcy? An Honest Answer
May 19, 2026 Mark McGinnis
You will find two kinds of confident answers online: “student loans can never be discharged” and “there is a secret loophole.” Both are wrong, and both are expensive to believe.
The accurate version: private student loans are far harder to discharge in bankruptcy than ordinary debt and often survive a filing. Not never. Not easily. Harder, and often surviving.
What that means practically. Bankruptcy is a powerful tool that can address many kinds of debt, and for some people it is absolutely the right decision for reasons that have nothing to do with student loans, like medical debt or credit cards. But a person who files primarily to erase a private student loan may find the loan still standing afterward. That is a very costly surprise, which is why it belongs in a conversation with a bankruptcy attorney who can look at your actual documents and your actual situation.
Questions worth asking a bankruptcy attorney: what kind of debt is this loan under the law, what would filing realistically accomplish for my whole financial picture, what would it cost, and what happens to my cosigner. That last question matters enormously for families, because a cosigner remains responsible for a debt that is not discharged.
We are not attorneys and this is not legal advice. What we can say is that bankruptcy is rarely the first tool people should reach for on a private student loan, and that other options are worth understanding first: hardship arrangements with the lender, negotiated resolutions with whoever now holds the debt, and refinancing a defaulted loan into a new one.
If you have a defaulted or charged-off private student loan, you may qualify for a refinance option with a low fixed rate. It costs nothing to check and we never charge you a fee. Check My Options at gradmerge.com/get-started.
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