The answer to the question of whether you'll get a lower interest rate by consolidating your student loans is: it depends.

When you consolidate your student loans, you are combining several loans together into one singular loan. Most of your loans will come with differing interest rates, loan terms, and monthly payment amount. When you consolidate your student loans, you are essentially unifying your loans so that you will only be working with one.

You should never consolidate your private loans with your federal loans because you will probably lose all the perks that come with federal loans, like loan deferment and lower interest rates.

When it comes to private loans, you'll probably get a lower interest rate on a consolidated loan if you now have a better credit score now than you did when you first got your loan.

With federal loans, a lot of it depends on when you got your loans and whether they have fixed or variable interest rates. During the consolidation process, the interest rates from each of your loans get averaged with a formula. The resulting interest rate will be rounded up to the nearest one eighth of a percent. It's fairly easy to figure out what this number will look like if you took out your loans after July 1, 2006. Since then all federal student loan interest rates have been fixed.

Before then, the interest-rates on student loans were often variable. If you have older variable-rate student loans you should figure out whether rates are lower now. If they are, you're better off consolidating at this lower rate.

When consolidating your student loans, the interest rate you get lasts through the entirety of your loan term. The advantage to this is that you can lock in a lower current rate. With your consolidated interest rate, you stick with that rate the whole time and you don’t have to worry about any changes during the duration of your loan.

Still thinking about consolidating your student loans? Take a look at our student loan consolidation guide.