Student loans are baked into the expectations for education in the United States. The amount of total student debt has increased by $1 trillion just since 2010. Those who are struggling to meet their loan obligations can consider refinancing their loans. But how many times can you refinance a student loan?

What Does It Mean to Refinance Student Loans?

Refinancing student loans can be an advantageous process when done the right way. Whether it’s for student debt, a mortgage, or another kind of loan, refinancing is one of the most popular solutions for people and organizations that want to get better terms and rates. But what is refinancing?

While refinancing is a pretty common procedure, the details of how it works aren’t as well-known as the name. At its core, refinancing student loans is just taking out a new loan to totally replace an old one. This can lead to several benefits, mostly related to lowering your interest rate, monthly payments, or both. 

Even though taking out more debt to pay for your current debt sounds like a bad idea, that’s not really what’s happening when you refinance. Since you’re totally replacing a loan, as opposed to using more borrowed money to meet your monthly payments, refinancing just improves the terms and conditions of your loan. 

Certainly, there are good reasons to refinance student loans. At the same time, some people might worry about refinancing at the right or wrong time. Fortunately, there’s not much to worry about here. 

How Many Times Can You Refinance a Student Loan?

When you’re looking to do a student loan refinance, you can rest happy knowing there’s no limit to the number of times you can go through with this process. That’s right—it doesn’t matter if you want to continue refinancing your student loans over and over again. And for some people, it will likely make sense to refinance multiple times. 

Since each time you refinance you’re technically getting an entirely new loan, there’s not even any situation where you would end up refinancing the same loan more than one time. Now that you know there’s no restriction on how many times you refinance student loans, let’s take a look at some other important aspects to refinancing. 

What Else Do You Need to Know about Refinancing a Student Loan?

With the knowledge of infinite refinancing under your belt, you still need to determine if refinancing is right for someone in your position at all. The first thing to consider is if you’ll actually receive some kind of benefit from refinancing a student loan. 

The most typical reason for refinancing is to lower your interest rate, which can save borrowers a substantial sum over the length of a loan. If you’re not going to lower your interest rate—or if you can only lower it by going with a variable rate—you might want to reconsider if refinancing really makes sense. If you can save money on interest, however, a student loan refinance can be highly advantageous.

Another critical point to take into consideration is if you’re looking to refinance a private or federal student loan. All student loan refinancing must be done through a private lender, as the federal government only does Direct Consolidation Loans, not refinancing. Since there are some highly desirable benefits that come with federal loans, such as the myriad repayment plans and loan forbearance, you should think long and hard before refinancing these. If you do so, you can get better rates and change your loan repayment term, but you’ll lose these features that only come with federal student loans. 

Borrowers can refinance their student loans as often as they want in order to get to a situation that fits their needs. This works particularly well due to the fact refinancing student loans is free. At the same time, you’ll want to make sure this is actually the right choice for you before going through with it.