In this letter, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) responds to questions about the effects of President Biden's August 24, 2022, announcement on executive actions affecting student loans. The cost of outstanding student loans will increase by $20 billion because an action suspended payments, interest accrual, and involuntary collections from September 2022 to December 2022, the CBO estimates. After accounting for those suspensions, CBO estimates that the cost of student loans will increase by about an additional $400 billion in present value as a result of the action canceling up to $10,000 of debt issued on or before June 30, 2022, for borrowers with income below specified limits and an additional $10,000 for such borrowers who also received at least one Pell grant. The cost of debt cancellation is the present value of the borrowers' projected repayments of student debt before accounting for the cancellation minus the present value of repayments after doing so. CBO's estimates are highly uncertain. The most uncertain components are the projections of how much borrowers would repay if the executive action canceling debt had not been undertaken and how much they will repay under that executive action. Those projections depend in part on future economic conditions and on how the terms of loans might be modified in the future.