On mortgage qualification, the impact is smaller than most people expect, because student debt was never invisible to underwriters even while payments were paused. What matters is which payment the underwriter counts, and that is program-specific: - FHA: the actual payment on your credit report if it's above zero; otherwise 0.5% of the outstanding balance. - Fannie Mae: the actual payment shown, including a documented $0 income-driven (IDR) payment; otherwise 1% of the balance. - Freddie Mac: 0.5% of the balance when no payment is documented. - VA: a threshold payment of 5% of the balance divided by 12. If you carry a large balance, your debt-to-income ratio very likely already reflects a payment. Borrowers already enrolled in an IDR plan often find that resuming payments changes little for qualifying and actually makes documentation cleaner. A counterintuitive wrinkle: IDR plans are based on discretionary income, which accounts for your housing cost. A buyer who takes on a mortgage can end up with a lower IDR payment than they had as a renter, because the higher housing payment lowers the discretionary-income figure the plan uses. Buying doesn't automatically make the loan burden worse. The broader economic effect is real but unpredictable, and we won't guess its size. Households that redirected paused-payment money have to re-budget, and resumed payments pull discretionary dollars out of the wider economy, which can cool spending and inflation at the margin. If student loans factor into your buying plans, the useful move is confirming exactly how your program treats that payment in your DTI, which we can run through with you on a free Roadmap conversation.