S. 4039: Professional Degree Access Restoration Act

The 2025 budget reconciliation law, Public Law 119-21, rewrote how graduate students pay for school. Starting July 1, 2026, it ended Grad PLUS loans for new borrowers — the federal loans that let graduate and professional students borrow up to the full cost of attendance — and put new annual and lifetime caps on the unsubsidized loans that remain. Students already enrolled before that date were given a temporary grandfather period.

S. 4039 would erase the June 30, 2026 end date and strike the new graduate and professional loan caps, restoring federal borrowing to the rules that applied before the 2025 law. The bill’s own title describes this as reversing “the reductions in Federal loan availability for graduate and professional students.”

The rest of the bill is cleanup. Because it deletes a whole block of the loan statute, the remaining provisions get renumbered and their cross-references updated. The temporary grandfather rule for students enrolled before July 2026 is also shortened, since there would be no new limits to be grandfathered out of.

The bill is short — a single substantive section — and sets no dollar figure of its own. Its effect is measured by what it removes: the ceiling on how much a graduate or professional student can borrow from the federal government.