A calendar of federal data releases higher ed IR teams should track in 2026

IPEDS runs three collection cycles per year, each covering a different slice of the institutional profile. The cycle you care about depends on which question landed on your desk.

Fall collection (September-October) gathers Institutional Characteristics, Completions, and 12-Month Enrollment. Winter collection (December-February) gathers Admissions, Graduation Rates, Student Financial Aid, Outcome Measures, and Cost. Spring collection (April) gathers Fall Enrollment, Finance, Human Resources, and Academic Libraries.

• Fall (Sep-Oct): Institutional Characteristics, Completions, 12-Month Enrollment
• Winter (Dec-Feb): Admissions, Grad Rates, Financial Aid, Outcome Measures, Cost
• Spring (Apr): Fall Enrollment, Finance, HR, Libraries

Here is the part that trips people up: data becomes publicly downloadable roughly ten months after the coordinator close date. Every IPEDS collection has two submission deadlines. First, the keyholder at each institution locks their data (keyholder close). Then, two weeks later, the state or system coordinator locks everything on their end. That second deadline is the coordinator close date, and it is the moment NCES starts the ten-month release clock. So a Fall collection with a coordinator close in late October releases the following summer. The Fall 2025-26 provisional data released on July 28, 2026, and the final version of the Fall 2024-25 collection followed on September 8, 2026. The next wave, Winter 2025-26 provisional, is expected in late 2026; NCES had not posted a date as of October 2, 2026, and the 2024-25 Winter wave came out on December 9, 2025.

Pell Grant data is published quarterly by academic year. The most recent release, posted on September 22, 2026 (FSA electronic announcement GENERAL-26-57), covers the full 2025-26 award year through June 30, 2026 (AY 2025-26 Q4). Treat it as preliminary: schools had until September 30, 2026 to submit their final 2025-26 Pell records, so the award-year totals will move in later releases. FSA has been posting each quarter about three months after it closes, which puts AY 2026-27 Q1 around December 2026. If your team is reporting on Pell utilization or packaging, the lag is usually one quarter behind the live award year, so plan any cabinet-facing numbers around the quarter you actually have in hand.

Loan volume data tracks the same quarterly academic-year cadence as Pell. The September 22, 2026 release runs through June 30, 2026, completing AY 2025-26, with AY 2026-27 Q1 expected next. First-pass loan totals for an award year usually rise over the following months as schools finish reporting. Subsidized and unsubsidized loan volumes are broken out separately, which matters when leadership asks about borrowing trends disaggregated by undergraduate versus graduate.

Cohort default rates are the slowest-moving of the Title IV datasets. FSA publicly released the FY 2023 official rates on September 30, 2026: a national rate of 0.4 percent, up from 0.0 percent for FY 2022, across 5,417 institutions (FSA electronic announcements). FSA itself warns that the figure is flattered by the payment pause, when borrowers with Department-held loans could not default. The FY 2024 draft rates, the first cohort measured entirely after the pause, go to schools in early 2027. Because CDRs track borrowers three years out from entering repayment, the figures always lag the current cohort by several years. If a provost asks about current default exposure, CDR is not the right source; pair it with your own servicing data.

The Clery dataset covers campus crime, fire, and safety statistics from 2008 through the 2025 survey. Watch the labeling: each survey year collects the previous calendar year, so the 2025 survey holds crimes and fires reported in calendar 2024. The next update is not expected until 2027, when the Fall data releases. If you are pulling Clery numbers for an annual security report or a board update, the 2025 file is the current source of record. Anything newer will not appear in the federal dataset for roughly two years.

EADA data is published annually by academic year. The latest available data covers academic year 2024-25. October 15, 2026 is the deadline for each institution to publish its own AY 2025-26 EADA report; the federal survey collection closes after that (it ran to October 30 in 2024), and OPE builds the public data file once the collection closes. Expect the national AY 2025-26 file late in 2026 or early 2027, not on October 15. EADA is the dataset you pull for Title IX participation and expenditure comparisons, and the annual cadence means the figures always sit one academic year behind the current one.

The Database of Accreditation for Postsecondary Institutions and Programs is a rolling dataset with no fixed release date. Accreditation actions are added as they are finalized, so there is no quarterly or annual window to watch. Pull DAPIP when you need a current snapshot of accredited programs or accrediting agencies; do not wait for a release notice that will not come.

College Scorecard is the most frequently refreshed of the federal outcome datasets, and the one behind Clema's College Scorecard agent. The June 10, 2026 release folds the prior snapshots into merged files that now run through 2025-26; the next update has no fixed schedule. Scorecard publishes a changelog alongside each release, so if you maintain a longitudinal earnings or repayment view, check the changelog before assuming a metric definition has stayed constant between pulls.

PSEO is a Census Bureau dataset that tracks earnings and employment outcomes by graduation cohort. The latest available data runs through the 2019-21 cohort, with cohorts of three years since 2001. Because it is cohort-based, the release cadence is irregular and tied to when Census completes a cohort window. PSEO is valuable for longitudinal earnings analysis, but the lag means it is a backward-looking source, not a real-time one.

PPD tracks program-level performance and currently runs through the 2019-21 cohort, with the most recent update landing on May 18, 2026. Like PSEO, it is cohort-based and irregular in cadence. PPD is the dataset most relevant to the new earnings-accountability rules under OBBBA, so its release schedule is worth watching closely even when no update is imminent. For more on how PPD fits alongside STATS and FVT/GE, see our STATS vs FVT/GE vs PPD explainer.

OEWS is the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey behind employment and wage estimates for about 830 occupations. The estimates cover the nation, every state, and hundreds of metro areas. It is the one dataset on this list that comes from the Department of Labor rather than the Department of Education or the Census Bureau. BLS releases new estimates once a year in spring; the May 2025 estimates arrived on May 15, 2026, a few weeks later than the early-April window BLS had kept in recent years, and the May 2026 estimates are expected in spring 2027.

IR teams pull OEWS when a program review or a new-program proposal needs labor-market context: map your CIP codes to SOC occupations through the CIP-to-SOC crosswalk and you can put a wage benchmark next to every program you run. One caution: OEWS reports what people already working in an occupation earn, not what new graduates earn, so pair it with College Scorecard or PSEO when the question is about your own graduates.