FAFSA, FA-DDX, & Federal Verification

FAFSA: Harvard Law School’s FAFSA code is E00471

Key things to note when completing the FAFSA.

  • All U.S. citizens and eligible non-U.S. citizens are required to file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in order to apply for financial aid at HLS, regardless of whether you intend to apply for consideration for HLS need-based grant assistance or for the federal Direct Unsubsidized Loans only.
  • International students are not eligible for federal aid and, therefore, cannot complete the FAFSA.
  • Your submission is processed by FAFSA and generally made available electronically to the HLS Student Financial Services Office in 48 hours. So, please allow at least 3 business days for the FAFSA to be changed to “received” on your “Application Requirements” tab of the SFS Self-Service Portal.
  • Be sure to list “Harvard Law School” rather than “Harvard University” as the data recipient on your application. If you do not, we will not get your data.
  • There is no cost to complete this form.
  • The Federal government considers all graduate students to be independent for the purposes of determining eligibility for federal loans. Therefore, you only need to complete the student (and spouse, if applicable) sections of this form. Parent information is not required on the FAFSA for graduate students.
  • The 2024-2025 FAFSA will ask you to report your 2022 calendar year income.  FAFSA data is only used to determine your eligibility for Federal Loans. If you are applying for HLS need-based grant, your eligibility will be based on the financial data you and your parents will be asked to report on our own institutional forms found within the SFS Self-Service Portal.

FA-DDX

The FAFSA uses a direct data exchange (FA-DDX) to import tax data from the IRS.

  • When filling out the FAFSA, applicants are required to approve the use of FA-DDX in order to be considered eligible for federal aid. Students (and spouses) must provide this consent even if they did not file a federal tax return. This greatly reduces the amount of manual data entry for applicants.
  • Under certain conditions, however, data will not be transferred via FA-DDX. In addition to non-tax filers, applicants with foreign tax returns or foreign earned income exclusion amounts, and those who are no longer married to the spouse listed on the given year’s tax return, will need to enter income and tax data manually in order to submit the FAFSA.
  • Students entering data manually have a greater likelihood of being selected for Federal Verification, which prompts additional documentation to be required by Student Financial Services before federal aid can be authorized. This will include submitting a Federal Verification Web Form and potentially an IRS tax transcript. Note that, due in part to IRS processing time, this additional documentation may take 6-8 weeks to complete.

Federal Verification

The U.S. Department of Education mandates that all schools that administer federal financial aid verify key pieces of financial information that were submitted as part of the FAFSA. The Department of Education randomly selects and flags students it selects for this process.
If you are selected, we will get in touch with you to request any additional financial information we will need to comply with this mandated verification process as determined by the US Department of Education. We will not be able to process your application for aid until we complete this required verification process so we appreciate your prompt attention to this requirement.