Sweeping changes to federal student loans included in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill are taking effect on Wednesday, with implications for millions of borrowers.Starting on July 1, new student loan borrowers will face a narrowed set of repayment options consisting of two freshly launched plans, and borrowing for professional and graduate students and parents of college students will be capped at lower amounts. Millions of current enrollees in a Biden-era loan repayment program will also begin receiving notice from federal student loan servicers that they must select a new plan to switch to within 90 days. Here’s what current and future borrowers should know about the changes, and how they could be affected. What’s changing?Under the One Big Beautiful Bill, loan limits for graduate and professional school students and parent borrowers will be tightened for those enrolling after Wednesday.Graduate students, who were previously allowed to borrow up to the cost of attendance at a college or university under the Grad PLUS loan program, will now have their borrowing capped at $20,500 per year, and no more than $100,000 over the course of their lifetime. Limits will also be tightened for professional students, to $50,000 per year and $200,000 in their lifetime.Parents of college students enrolling in the Parent PLUS loan program will also face lower loan caps. The program, like Grad PLUS, previously permitted parents to take loans up to the cost of attendance; that number will now be $20,000 annually and $65,000 total per student.There is also now a lifetime loan limit of $257,000 for anyone else who receives a federal student loan on or after July 1.Current borrowers will be grandfathered into the prior limits, allowing them to continue borrowing up to those levels under current programs for three academic years or until their program finishes. For those taking out federal student loans on or after Wednesday, the One Big Beautiful Bill effectively leaves two options for repayment: the Tiered Standard Plan and the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP).The first is a fixed-rate repayment option under which a borrower’s monthly payment amount is determined based on how much they owe and their interest rate. Those who take out less than $25,000 will have 10 years to repay the loan, those who take out $25,000-$49,999 will have 15, those who take out $50,000-99,999 will have 20, and those who take out $100,000 or more will have 25.Under the RAP plan, meanwhile, borrowers will make monthly payments amounting to around 1 to 10% of their income, with a minimum amount of $10 a month. Those enrolled in the plan will also be able to subtract $50 from their monthly payment for each dependent in their household. Unlike previous income-driven plans, which generally had a timeline of 20-25 years, the RAP plan will offer loan forgiveness after 30.The Biden-era Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, meanwhile, is officially coming to an end after it was ruled unconstitutional by a federal court in March. Borrowers under the program, an income-driven repayment plan launched in 2023, will have to shift to another program within 90 days of when they receive notice from servicers. Payments for SAVE plan enrollees have been paused since July 2024.What does this mean for borrowers?Many current borrowers will not be immediately impacted by these changes, but should take steps to ensure that they are set up with payment plans after certain grace periods expire. “There's one group in particular that is really going to need to take action, and those are over seven and a half million people who are enrolled in the SAVE Plan,”, says Betsy Mayotte, the president and founder of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors (TISLA). She notes that it could be “a lot more expensive” for those borrowers to make payments under the new plans. “We are seeing a lot of angst around that issue.”In addition to the SAVE Plan, the existing Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR) plan and the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) plan are set to sunset in July 2028. By that point current borrowers under those programs must choose another to switch to, or else will be automatically enrolled in an alternative.Mayotte says that “the best thing [borrowers] can do is educate themselves about what their options are,” and points to studentaid.gov, which outlines the steps for current and former students navigating the loan enrollment and repayment process, or TISLA, which offers free advice on borrowing. Speaking about the RAP plan, Mayotte says that “for some borrowers that plan is going to be more beneficial than the existing plan, and for others it's going to be less beneficial. It really depends on how much they owe, when they took their loans out, and what their income is … For the borrowers who have really high debt and likely will always have fairly low income compared to their debt, the RAP is better.”She is critical, however, of the RAP plan’s 30-year forgiveness timeline, which she says is “alarming” and could have significant long-term consequences for borrowers’ finances, or their retirement. In terms of the new loan limits, meanwhile, proponents of the One Big Beautiful Bill argue that the caps will pressure colleges to lower costs and discourage students from borrowing beyond their means. Aissa Canchola Bañez, director of policy at the nonprofit advocacy organization Protect Borrowers, tells TIME that they will instead compel students to take out loans from private lenders, however.“They're going to be forced into the private market in order to fill the gap, and the private market is much harder to secure financing,” she says. For some students, she believes it’s “absolutely possible” that the new limits could even make them forgo higher education opportunities altogether.Bañez says that overall, the student loan changes going into effect on Wednesday are “going to make it harder for students and families to pay for college, and it's going to make it more expensive and risky for borrowers to repay their student loans.”