Tax filing with existing loans on SAVE – effects of MFS / MFJ on IBR/RAP plans?

Situation: I currently have no student loans. My wife currently has about $120k in grad school loans dating back to ~2001 (med school dropout, then got a masters after kids were in school). They were on a variety of payment plans (ICR, IBR) as new options came out. We consolidated them in 2023 and moved to SAVE. Like everyone, we've been on forbearance on SAVE for quite a while. We're not currently making any payments since we're paying for our daughter's wedding 🙂

We also have about $40k and counting in Parent Plus loans that are new, since we've got 2 kids in college currently. We're not in repayment on them yet and have 2.5 years till graduation.

All the loans are in my wife's name only. Over the years we've done our taxes MFJ or MFS depending on her income and what plan we were on. We currently each make about the same income gross, but hers is lower AGI since we get benefits through her work.

According to the backdoor counter, she's at 205 months towards forgiveness on old IBR for the grad loans. We've pretty much always planned on forgiveness on them.

We are planning to do any new Parent Plus loans in my name so we don't force her loans all onto RAP. We want to do IBR for the shorter path to forgiveness for her grad loans and we plan to consolidate the parent plus so those can go IBR as well.

I've run our 2025 federal taxes both as MFJ and MFS. It's about $6500 higher to do separate since we lose the education credits for the two kids in college. However, plugging her loans into a loan calculator indicates that her grad loans under IBR would be about $65/mo if she claims all the kids and we file separately. RAP would be around $100. If we file jointly to save on our federal taxes, the monthly payment would be over $900 on either plan!

According to the latest info from AidVantage, our recert date is not till 5/2027. However, I assume we'd have to recert whenever we want to move to IBR and I suspect that will have to happen before May of 2027.

Given those repayment numbers, I think we have to file separately (we filed jointly last year, so we can't use that for recertification sadly). Am I right on that?