You cannot skip a mortgage payment on your own without consequences, but your servicer can authorize a pause through a forbearance or deferment agreement. These programs let you stop or reduce payments for a set period, usually three to six months, while protecting you from foreclosure. Interest typically keeps accruing during the pause, and whatever you skip has to be repaid later through a lump sum, a repayment plan, or a deferral that pushes the balance to the end of the loan.
Grace Period Is Not the Same as Skipping
Every mortgage has a due date, almost always the first of the month. Nearly all loan agreements include a grace period of 10 to 15 days before a late fee kicks in. Paying on the 12th feels late, but your servicer treats it the same as paying on the 1st. No fee, no credit report mark.
Once that grace period expires, the servicer can charge a late fee of roughly 4% to 5% of the overdue amount.1eCFR. 12 CFR 1024.41 – Loss Mitigation Procedures After 30 days with no payment, the delinquency goes on your credit report. If you already know you cannot make an upcoming payment, calling your servicer and requesting a formal forbearance or deferment is a different situation entirely from just letting the payment slide.
Forbearance and Deferment: What Your Servicer Can Offer
Forbearance temporarily suspends or reduces your monthly payments. An initial period usually runs three to six months, and some programs allow extensions. Forbearance does not erase what you owe. Your balance stays the same, and interest continues to accrue on the paused amounts until you repay them.2Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What Is Mortgage Forbearance It buys breathing room, but it is not free.
Deferment works differently. Instead of requiring you to catch up on missed payments right away, the servicer moves the skipped amounts to the end of your loan term as a non-interest-bearing balance. You resume your regular monthly payment, and the deferred amount comes due when you pay off the mortgage, sell the home, or refinance.3Fannie Mae. D2-3.2-04, Payment Deferral For a short-term hardship, deferment is often the least disruptive path back to normal.
Federal rules require your servicer to evaluate you for all available loss mitigation options, not only the one you asked about, and to give you a written decision explaining what they will or will not offer.1eCFR. 12 CFR 1024.41 – Loss Mitigation Procedures If the servicer only mentions one option, ask about the others by name.
How to Request a Pause
Start with a hardship letter. It does not have to be long. Explain what happened, whether it is a job loss, a medical emergency, a divorce, or another financial disruption, and why it is preventing you from making the payment. Servicers look for a clear cause and some sign that the hardship is temporary.
Beyond the letter, expect to provide recent bank statements (usually two months), pay stubs or a profit-and-loss statement if you are self-employed, and federal tax returns from the last one to two years. Medical bills or disability documentation help if the hardship is health-related. Most servicers post hardship application forms on their loss mitigation portal, and those forms will ask you to list monthly expenses in detail. Filling this out accurately gives the servicer a clear view of your remaining disposable income.
Federal regulations set firm deadlines once you submit. The servicer must acknowledge receipt of your application within five business days. Once the application is complete, the servicer has 30 days to evaluate you for all available options and send a written decision.1eCFR. 12 CFR 1024.41 – Loss Mitigation Procedures A denial notice must include the specific reasons and explain your right to appeal. Keep copies of everything. If the servicer later says they never got your application, those records are your protection.
What a Pause Does to Your Credit
This is where most borrowers get the story wrong. If your account was current when you entered an approved forbearance, your servicer must continue reporting it as current to the credit bureaus.4Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Manage Your Money During Forbearance A properly reported forbearance should not drop your score. The catch is that “properly reported” does a lot of work in that sentence. Servicer errors happen, and some lenders note the forbearance on your file even while reporting the account as current. Future lenders reviewing your report may see that notation and ask questions.
If you were already behind when you entered forbearance, the servicer maintains whatever delinquent status existed at the start of the agreement. It will not get worse during the pause, but it will not improve until you bring the account current. The worst scenario is skipping payments with no agreement in place. In that case, the servicer reports a new delinquency for every missed month: 30, 60, 90 days, each one hitting harder than the last.
How You Repay What You Paused
When your forbearance ends, you and your servicer have to settle on how to handle the accumulated balance. The options generally fall into four categories.
- Reinstatement: You pay the entire missed amount in one lump sum. Clean on paper, unrealistic for most borrowers coming out of a hardship.
- Repayment plan: The servicer spreads the missed payments over several months by adding a portion to each regular bill. For Fannie Mae loans, a repayment plan for borrowers 90 days or less delinquent typically runs up to six months, with extensions to 12 months possible with servicer approval.5Fannie Mae. D2-3.2-02, Repayment Plan
- Payment deferral: The missed amounts move to the end of the loan as a non-interest-bearing balance due at maturity, sale, or refinance. For borrowers who can resume the regular payment but not a catch-up amount, this is usually the best fit.3Fannie Mae. D2-3.2-04, Payment Deferral
- Loan modification: If the hardship is not temporary, the servicer may restructure the loan itself, changing the interest rate, extending the term, or reducing the principal to create a payment you can sustain long-term. This involves fuller underwriting.
Your servicer must evaluate you for all of these before moving toward foreclosure.1eCFR. 12 CFR 1024.41 – Loss Mitigation Procedures If only one is offered and it does not work for you, ask to be evaluated for the others in writing.
FHA Partial Claims
Borrowers with FHA-insured loans have an additional option called a standalone partial claim. HUD allows the servicer to place the past-due amounts into a separate, interest-free subordinate lien against the property. You do not repay the second lien until you make your final mortgage payment, sell the home, refinance, or transfer the title.6U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). FHA’s Loss Mitigation Program If you have an FHA mortgage, ask your servicer about this by name because it is one of the most borrower-friendly tools available.
VA Loan Differences
VA-backed mortgages have their own loss mitigation menu, including special forbearance, repayment plans, and modifications. One important difference: missed payments during a VA forbearance are not automatically tacked onto the end of your loan, so you need to work out a specific repayment arrangement with your servicer when the forbearance ends.7U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. VA Help To Avoid Foreclosure VA borrowers can call a VA loan technician at 877-827-3702 for guidance on which option fits their situation.
Watch for the Escrow Shortage
While you are in forbearance, your servicer still has to pay your property taxes and homeowners insurance from the escrow account.8Freddie Mac. Forbearance Plans and Requirements Since no money is coming in, the account runs a deficit. When forbearance ends, the servicer runs an escrow analysis and discovers that shortage. For a payment deferral or loan modification, Fannie Mae requires the servicer to spread the escrow shortage repayment over 60 months unless you choose a faster payoff (but no shorter than 12 months).9Fannie Mae. Administering an Escrow Account and Paying Expenses Even spread over five years, this can add $50 to $150 to your monthly payment depending on your tax and insurance costs. Budget for it.
What Happens If You Just Stop Paying
Skipping payments without an agreement is a fundamentally different situation, and the consequences escalate quickly. After the grace period, the servicer charges a late fee of roughly 4% to 5% of the overdue payment. At 30 days past due, the delinquency hits your credit report. At 90 days, most mortgage contracts contain an acceleration clause that allows the lender to demand the entire remaining loan balance in full.10Legal Information Institute (LII) / Cornell Law School. Acceleration Clause Lenders rarely exercise that right immediately, but the option exists from that point forward.
Federal law prohibits your servicer from starting foreclosure until your loan is at least 120 days delinquent.1eCFR. 12 CFR 1024.41 – Loss Mitigation Procedures After that mark, the timeline depends on your state. Judicial foreclosure states require a court proceeding that can take a year or more; non-judicial foreclosure states can move in a few months. A completed foreclosure means losing the home and taking a credit hit that lasts seven years.
Even if you are already behind, filing a complete loss mitigation application before the foreclosure process begins forces the servicer to pause and evaluate you for assistance before proceeding.1eCFR. 12 CFR 1024.41 – Loss Mitigation Procedures Calling sooner gives you more options, but it is never too late to pick up the phone.
Refinancing After a Forbearance
Completing a forbearance does not permanently lock you out of refinancing, but there is a waiting period. For loans backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, you need three consecutive on-time payments under a repayment plan or after exiting forbearance before you are eligible to refinance. FHA rate-and-term refinances and streamline refinances follow a similar three-payment rule. FHA cash-out refinances require at least 12 consecutive on-time payments.
If you are thinking about refinancing to lower your rate or pull equity, plan for those waiting periods before you exit forbearance. Choosing a repayment plan over a deferral, for instance, starts the clock on those required payments sooner. A forbearance notation on your credit file may still prompt extra scrutiny from the new lender’s underwriters even after you have met the minimum payment requirements. Documentation showing the hardship is resolved and your income has stabilized makes that conversation easier.