Federal Student Aid has released volumes of the 2025-26 FAFSA Specifications Guide. The volumes contained in this guide contain FAFSA Processing System (FPS) technical information for the 2025-26 award year and are only available as PDF documents at this time.
Update on November 27, 2024: FSA has revised the Excel ISIR record layout in Volume 4a – Record Layouts to update the names for field #61 and field #183 from “Revised Family Size” to “Updated Family Size. We updated multiple edits in Volume 5 – Edits and Rejects. Review the Change History Table near the beginning of the volume for more information. FSA also updated Volume 6 – ISIR Guide to include revisions to the description of the Person UUID field. Review the Change History Table near the beginning of the volume for more information.
The Volume 7 – Comment Codes update includes revisions to the Action Needed column for comments 155, 292, 293, and 294. Review the Change History Table near the beginning of the volume for more information. Volume 8 – Agency Matches has been updated to remove references to the DHS Secondary Match status values in the ISIR. Review the Change History Table near the beginning of the volume for more information on the change location..
The following volumes remain unchanged:
- Introduction
- Volume 1 – Summary of Changes
- Volume 2 – FPS Schedule and Getting Help
- Volume 3 – Electronic Data Exchange and FAFSA Processing
- Volume 4B – Processing Codes
- Volume 9 – Testing and Web Demo System
View the specification guide here.
SOURCE: 2025–26 FAFSA Specifications Guide (November 2024 Update #5)