One credit load. Six sets of rules. Six different answers.
Twelve credits makes you full time for Title IV. It does not automatically settle your Pell amount, your loan limit, your GI Bill housing allowance, or your F-1 status — each of those runs its own test, on its own denominator, with its own rounding.
Take 9 credits in the fall and 12 in the spring: Pell treats you as a 75% student, the loan rule treats you as an 88% student. Flip the order and the loan is identical while the Pell and housing allowance change. This site works out which number applies to which rule.
Start with a question
- How many credit hours is full time? — 12 is a floor, not a definition
- How many credit hours is a bachelor's degree? — 120, and why some pages say 360
- How much does part-time enrollment cut my loan? — the 2026 proration rule
Browse by topic
- Credit hours — what counts, and toward what
- The rules — regulations quoted, cited and dated
Why one number is not enough
Six federal programs read your credit load, and they disagree by design. Full-time status and Pell are measured per term. Loan proration is measured across the whole academic year. The GI Bill housing allowance turns on a threshold rather than a percentage — strictly more than half time, so exactly half pays nothing. F-1 status adds a cap on how much of that load may be online. SAP looks at your cumulative record instead of any single term.
None of these rules was written to line up with the others, and none of the offices applying them is wrong. That is why a question as simple as "am I part time?" has several correct answers at once, and why generic advice about part-time enrollment usually gets at least one of your programs wrong.
How the numbers here are produced
Every figure traces to the regulation behind it, quoted rather than paraphrased where the wording carries the meaning. Comparison tables are computed at build time from the same rule data the tools use, so a published number cannot drift away from the rule it illustrates. Each page records the date its sources were last checked, because these rules changed substantially in July 2026 and much of what is published elsewhere predates that.
This site is not official and does not give advice. Your financial aid office, your DSO and the VA make the determinations that count. The purpose here is to let you check their number against the regulation — and to know which regulation to ask about.