If you are interested in receiving financial aid for college, you will likely need to fill out the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) as a starting point. The FAFSA application requests financial information about your family, including tax return information. However, there are two changes coming with the 2017-18 FAFSA that applicants should be aware of: 1. the FAFSA was made available on October 1, 2016, which is nearly 3 months earlier than in previous years, and 2. beginning with the 2017-18 FAFSA, you will be not be asked to submit your most recent tax returns (e.g. your 2016 tax returns) but rather the tax returns for the previous year (e.g. your 2015 tax returns). Students and their families are encouraged to review the following chart, published on this U.S. Department of Education blog: http://blog.ed.gov/2016/08/2-major-fafsa-changes-need-aware/ The earlier application date will be a big help to students applying for early admissions to schools, or applying to schools with earlier application deadlines. In addition, the use of older tax data should help alleviate pressure to estimate taxes that haven't yet been filed with the IRS, or to log back into the FAFSA application to updated your financial information after your family taxes have been filed. For more information about how these changes might affect you, visit the original blog post. For help with filling out the FAFSA, visit https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/fafsa/filling-out.