Who gets to be a doctor in America is about to change. An under-discussed component of President Trump’s big, beautiful domestic policy law is a new loan cap that will slowly push aspiring physicians from lower-income backgrounds out of medicine and drive future doctors away from primary care.
Effective next year, federal student loans for professional graduate programs, including medical school, will be capped at $50,000 per year. Total lifetime borrowing will be limited to $200,000 for medical school and $257,000 across all degrees, including college. Grad PLUS loans, which almost half of all medical students currently rely on to help cover the cost of training, will be eliminated entirely.
The alternative is private loans, which tend to be considerably more expensive, and far less forgiving.
The new caps are dissociated from reality. In 2025, the median cost of attending four years of medical school was $297,745 for public schools and over $400,000 for private ones.
About 70 percent of graduating medical students in 2025 have loans, and among those who owe money, the average student debt is $223,130. But an average is just that. We calculate that nearly 30 percent of students owe over $257,000, and that one in five students graduate with over $300,000 in debt.
