You're in a great situation. The most hassle-free way is to pay them off completely early. However, if you do want to milk the situation for credit score reasons, you can do that as well. Like iamlindoro noted, you need to be making regular payments to get credit score clout. So, if you currently have a really low balance, the regular payments should also become really low, especially if you'd be essentially dividing the balance by the number of months until 2021. Thus, your credit report would still show you making regular payments on your loans that are very easy to manage financially. Realize you'd still be paying a slight amount of interest for this benefit. So you'd have to calculate the benefit to your credit score vs. the inconvenience of still worrying about them + the interest and see which is the best move. Call your lender to make sure beforehand that the payment plan you would owe each month would be a small fraction since you are ahead of schedule and NOT the original payment plan amount that would likely zap your loans shortly (in which case, just pay them off and move on).