2025-26 Award Year Aid Eligibility Updates

Oracle Student Financial Aid has been updated to support processing ISIRs for the new 2025-2026 award year and provide projected aid offers for your students. The Award Year Aid Eligibility updates gives you the ability to receive and process 25/26 ISIRs as defined by the Department of Education in the published 2025-26 FAFSA Specifications Guide.

Within the product, you can now receive, process, and view these files with support for comment codes, rejects, verification, discrepancy logic, FTI requirements, etc.

  • You can load the updated 2025-2026 ISIR FPS files into Oracle Student Financial Aid
    • IDAP26OP: Daily Electronic Application ISIRs
    • IGCO26OP: FPS Daily ISIRs - ISIRs generated by institutional corrections
    • IGSG26OP: FPS Pushed ISIRs - System-Generated
    • IGSA26OP: FPS Pushed ISIRs
  • The following ISIR File updates are supported
    • Re-Named ISIR fields
      • #41, #42, #58, #346, #347, #363, #811, #834, #857, #868, #869, #908, #909, #928, #929
    • Modified Valid Content
      • #1, #8, #12, #13, #16, #29, #130, #136, #164, #170, #220, #226, #254, #266, #272, #273, #274, #275, #312, #321, #570
    • Deleted fields
      • #558 (Changed to a filler field)
  • You can view the 25/26 ISIR information within Oracle Student Financial Aid
    • View the appropriate ISIR field level grouping in the View ISIR UI, the ISIR Review task UI, the ISIR Verification task UI, and the Professional Judgement Review task UI
    • View the ISIR corrected fields and values on the UI from View ISIR UI 
    • All FTI fields for 25/26 will only be viewable if the user has the "FTI Viewer" permission
  • The 25/26 ISIR can be used in packaging your students to provide projected aid offers for your students.
  • Once enabled, the system can send ISIR corrections, using the CORR26IN file for the 25/26 Award Year
  • System can successfully load and process 25/26 ISIR Error Files from FPS including (no changes from prior year file version): 
    • CORE26OP: Electronic Correction Errors
    • EAPR26OP: Electronic Application Rejects
    • SIGA26OP: Signature Record Errors
  • The following data has been set in system default logic for the 25/26 Award Year with the ability to update configuration as desired
    • ISIR regulatory dates for 25/26 award year
    • ISIR Verification Rules and Tracking Groups for 25/26 award year
    • ISIR Comment / SAR C-Codes for 25/26 award year
  • The following updates were made to baseline configuration to support the 25/26 award year values
    • For regulatory configuration, we updated the FAFSA, ISIR Award Year, ISIR Correction, ISIR Verification, etc for the 25/26 Award Year. The general availability to receive ISIRs this year will be Dec 1st per the Department of Education Electronic announcement sent out in August. However, ED has not yet released many of the official dates for the 2025-26 Award Year, so we used and incremented the dates from the prior year as a template. 
      • REGULATORY_DEADLINES.csv

    • For the ISIR configuration workbooks, there were minimal changes from the prior award year.

      • ISIR_C_CODES.csv
      • ISIR_DISCREP.csv
      • ISIR_C_CODES_TO_FIELDS.csv
      • ISIR_MGMT.csv
      • ISIR_REJECT_CODES_TO_FIELDS.csv
      • ISIR_REJECT_CODES.csv
      • ISIR_REJECT_CODES_TO_C_CODES.csv
      • ISIR_VERIFICATION_CODES.csv
      • ISIR_HIGHLIGHT.csv
    • For Document, PJ, and COA configuration, the baseline configuration logic was copied from the 24/25 Award Year.
      • DOCUMENTS.csv
      • DOCMETADATA.csv
      • PJ.csv
      • COA.csv
    • Please refer to the baseline configuration delivered in the Release Notes posted on Cloud Customer Connect for the full details of how each workbook was updated.

This feature allows your institution to begin processing aid eligibility for the new 2025-2026 award year.

Steps to Enable

Use the Opt In UI to enable this feature. For instructions, refer to the Optional Uptake of New Features section of this document.

Offering: Student Financial Aid

  • You will need to configure your environment to process ISIRs for the new 25/26 award year
    • Configuration will need to be added to the following workbooks
      • REGULATORY_DEADLINES.csv
      • ISIR_C_CODES.csv
      • ISIR_DISCREP.csv
      • ISIR_C_CODES_TO_FIELDS.csv
      • ISIR_MGMT.csv
      • ISIR_REJECT_CODES_TO_FIELDS.csv
      • ISIR_REJECT_CODES.csv
      • ISIR_REJECT_CODES_TO_C_CODES.csv
      • ISIR_VERIFICATION_CODES.csv
      • ISIR_HIGHLIGHT.csv
      • DOCUMENTS.csv
      • DOCMETADATA.csv
      • PJ.csv
      • COA.csv

        • You can choose to update your COA as soon as you have 25/26 values available in order to provide more accurate projected award amounts for 25/26.

    • Student Financial Aid baseline configuration updates for 25/26 can be used as a guide for the necessary award year configuration changes. 
      • Please refer to the 2 sets of baseline configuration delivered in the Release Notes posted on Cloud Customer Connect for a reference on what values should be updated.
        • One version that includes the updates to the ISIR Discrepancy workbook that will send all corrections for the 25/26 Award Year to a manual task queue, and another version that has auto-corrections for 25/25 discrepancies. We advise that you do not use the auto-corrections version of baseline configuration or turn on ISIR corrections until ED will accept batch corrections
  • Next, you will need to enable each Department of Education file format that can be received from FAFSA Processing System (FPS) that you want SFA to process. 
    • Ensure the DOE File Management General Permission is enabled
    • Navigate to the DOE File Management User Interface
      • Choose Award Year 2025-2026
      • Select the file names that you want SFA to process
      • Add the date and time you wish to enable these files
    • Do not enable CORE26OP or CORR26IN immediately as the Department of Education has not yet communicated when they will allow system generated ISIR corrections for the 25/26 Award Year.
  • Lastly, you will want to ensure that your TG number/passwords are set for your FTI-SAIG and SAIG mailboxes, and TD clients are enabled

Tips And Considerations

  • Since the Department of Education is not accepting 25/26 ISIR batch corrections presently, we are delivering 2 sets on baseline configuration for 25/26.
    • You will see one version that includes the updates to the ISIR Discrepancy workbook that will send all corrections for the 25/26 Award Year to a manual task queue, and another version that has auto-corrections for 25/26 discrepancies.
    • We advise that you do not use the auto-corrections version of baseline configuration or turn on ISIR corrections until ED will accept batch corrections
  • Within your Regulatory Deadlines Configuration workbook, ensure that the FAFSA, ISIR Award Year, ISIR Correction, and ISIR Verification start dates align. 
    • If these dates are in the future, ISIRs will not progress through the Valid ISIR process.  For testing environments it may be necessary to adjust these dates
    • If these dates are moved to a future date after processing has occurred previously Valid ISIRs will flip to "Inactive" so be sure to keep these dates static after processing has occurred.  
  • With the DOE File Management User Interface, do not enable CORE26OP or CORR26IN immediately as the Department of Education has not yet communicated when they will allow system generated ISIR corrections for the 25/26 Award Year.
  • If you are using the Person UUID within your ISIR matching logic, or within any groovy logic, please note that the Department of Education has stated that the Person UUID will not be consistent for a student year over year.

Key Resources