Just released recently was information about the new 2013-14 FAFSA. Must to the surprise of many an FA person, the Pell Grant will actually be going up. Originally, there had been talk of trying to find ways of keeping the Pell Grant maximum at the $5550 per award year. Now, it will raise $95 to a maximum of $5645.
However, keep in mind, this will be interesting in that seemingly almost any way you divide this new Pell Grant, almost none of it comes out exact. What I mean is splitting it into semesters and quarters and splitting into the less than full-time amounts.
For two full-time semesters, it's going to be $2823 for one and $2822 for the other. For three quarters, it'll split into $1882, $1882, and $1881. It's been quite a while since the Pell Grant wasn't split into even disbursements for full-time students (and for that matter, the less than full-time students).
You should also remember that until the award year starts, they can change things. It isn't likely, but a couple years ago, the Dept of Ed released the Pell Grant charts in January, then in April changed what some of the EFC's correlated to.
Speaking of EFC's, the other news is that the maximum EFC to still qualify for any Pell Grant funds went up for the 2013-14 FAFSA. This is good news for the borderline students. The 2011-12 FAFSA allowed an EFC to be slightly over 5000 in order to qualify for Pell Grant funds. The current 2012-13 FAFSA has an EFC cutoff of 4995, but the 2013-14 FAFSA will have an EFC cutoff of 5081.
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