How Many People Have Student Loan Debt?

One of the most important considerations that students think about when making their college choice is cost and how they are going to pay for school.

Federal student loans can help students pursue higher education if they are not able to afford the rising cost of college on their own. However, with student loans inevitably comes student loan debt.

Whether they are in debt by $5,000 or $200,000, over 43 million people in the United States have student loan debt. In this report, we’ve rounded up the latest data about how many people have student loan debt, including by state, age, gender, and ethnicity.

In the past decade, the average cost of college tuition increased by 14%, from $12,615 to $14,307.^[5] As the cost of college continues to rise, the number of people with student loans has also increased.

According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, in the 2019-2020 school year, 61% of bachelor’s recipients had student loan debt.^[6] Levels of borrowing varied by race/ethnicity.

Black students had a much higher rate of student loan borrowing.

In general, more women tend to have student loan debt than men. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics:

It is important to note that not all student loan borrowers fall into strictly “male” or “female” binaries. Transgender and nonbinary students might have a “sex assigned at birth” that does not coincide with their gender identity and/or expression.

Although people across many age groups can incur education-related debt, nearly two-thirds of borrowers are between the ages of 25 and 49.^{Note Reference [1]}

By the end of 2023, there were:^{Note Reference [1]}

In the 2019-20 academic year, over 1.2 million bachelor’s recipients and 395,000 associate degree recipients had student loans.^{Note Reference [6], [8]}

Though the total number of students who graduated with student loan debt from public schools was higher overall than from private schools, this is only because many more students attend public colleges. Students who graduated from private schools held student loans at higher rates than those graduating from public schools.^{Note Reference [6], Note Reference [8]}

The number of student loan borrowers varies across state lines. Although the median percentage of a state’s student loan debt was about 13% in 2023, there were a few standouts — Washington D.C. has the highest percentage of its population that holds student loan debt at almost 17.6%, and Hawaii has the lowest at around 8.7%.^{Note Reference [1], [9]}