Repayment of student loans usually starts when graduates begin low-paying jobs, which creates concerns that repayment obligations might lower early-career wages. This study investigates whether changes in borrowers’ yearly incomes are related to the beginning of student loan repayment. We track a cohort of individuals born between 1980 and 1984 from 1997 to 2007 using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). We use a staggered difference-in-differences event-study approach to estimate wage dynamics around the first year in which a borrower’s outstanding loan total decreases. Pre-treatment estimates violate the parallel trends assumption necessary for a causal interpretation by demonstrating consistent disparities in salary trajectories between earlier and later re-payers. Post-treatment effects are negligible and statistically indistinguishable from zero. We find no conclusive evidence that salaries change at the start of repayment within these bounds, and our research is further limited by missing controls on hours worked, occupation, sector, and socioeconomic background.