How long after submitting the FAFSA should it take for students to find out how much aid he/she might qualify for?
When completed and signed correctly, an electronic FAFSA goes into the federal processor’s database immediately. Application information becomes available to the schools you have listed about one week later. Each school’s processing cycle differs, but generally speaking it will take a minimum of 2 weeks for an award to be processed. If a student files the paper version of the FAFSA, it will take a minimum of four weeks to get a Student Aid Report and for the colleges to receive that information from the central processor. At that point, if a student has been admitted to the university, and if no additional information is required, it should take approximately two-three weeks for our office to send an award notification to the student. If a student applies by March 1, our office would receive the information by mid-March, so it would be mid-March before the student would hear from the Office of Financial Aid.
