To view the servicer of your federal student loan, you can view our guide on locating your federal student loan servicer.
Student borrowers who have loans owned by the Department of Education (ED) can easily track the lifecycle of their current and past federally-backed loans. Students who were issued loans through private lenders will need to do some of the legwork to locate their loan servicer/s.
Check your mail, email, and phone, and browser records
If the loan was recently issued, you can wait until the lender provide you with information on your loan. So, be sure to look out for those.
You can also check your email, phone call log, and browser records to search for keywords pertaining to student loans.
When searching through your records, be sure to also search for credit inquiry alerts as a credit check would have likely been performed when you applied for the loan. If you’re using a credit monitoring service that sends you alerts about changes to your credit report, you would typically receive the alerts via email or text.
Contact your financial institutions
It’s likely that one of your current or past financial institutions is the lender for your private student loan. Start by contacting the financial institutions that you belonged to around the time that you believe you received the loan. You’ll then want to contact your current financial institutions.
Check your credit reports
This is the quickest way to confirm your student loan lender is to check your credit reports.
Locate your private student loan in the accounts section of your credit report
If your private student loan has been reported to the credit bureaus and is displayed on your credit report, the contact information for the lender will be displayed on your credit report. It can take upwards of a few months for new loans to report to credit bureaus.
Check the inquiries sections of your credit report
When you apply for credit, in most cases, a credit check is required. Credit inquiries typically appear on your credit report almost instantly. You should be sure to check both the hard inquiry section of your credit report and also the soft inquiry section. The soft inquiry section will display promotional inquiries from companies that wanted to view your credit for promotional offers, including student loans.
Your current lenders could have performed an account review in order to extend other credit services (including loans) to you. These inquiries are normally listed as Account Review, or similar terminology.
If your credit report contains soft inquiries from lenders that you don’t currently do business, it’s important to do your due diligence before contact the lender. Remember that the companies gained access to your credit report so that they could promote their lending services to you. So, if you contact them, you are likely to receive a sales pitch. In addition, if you want to confirm that they’re servicing your loan, you’ll have to provide them with personal information, which will likely include your full name, phone number, address, date of birth, social security number. If you don’t believe that you would have accepted a loan from the company, it’s probably best not to contact them. If the lender, unbeknownst to you, is unethical, you may be bombarded with telemarketing calls and/or put your personal data at risk of being used inappropriately. As always, you should be cautious about the personal information that you share with companies.