Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, most negative information stays on your credit report for seven years. That covers late payments, collection accounts, charge-offs, and most other adverse entries. A few items last longer, the seven-year clock does not always start when you’d expect, and the reporting deadline is a separate question from whether a collector can still sue you. Those three wrinkles are what trip people up when they want to know how long negative information stays on a credit report.
What the Seven-Year Rule Covers
Federal law, codified at 15 U.S.C. ยง 1681c, requires consumer reporting agencies to drop most adverse information once it has aged past seven years. The specific categories include:
- Collection accounts and charge-offs: any account placed for collection or charged to profit and loss by a creditor.
- Late payments: missed or late payment history, which falls under the statute’s general catch-all for adverse items.
- Civil suits and civil judgments: seven years from the date of entry, or until the governing statute of limitations expires, whichever is longer.
- Paid tax liens: seven years from the date of payment.
The statute also includes a residual category covering “any other adverse item of information” not specifically listed, so long as it is not a criminal conviction record. That catch-all is what captures late payments and most negative entries that don’t fit the named categories.
When the Seven-Year Clock Actually Starts
For collection accounts and charge-offs, the clock does not start on the day the account went to collections. It starts 180 days after the original delinquency, meaning the missed payment that began the chain of events leading to the collection or charge-off.
Here is how that works in practice. If you stopped paying a credit card in January 2020 and the creditor charged it off in June 2020, the seven-year clock started running in July 2020, 180 days after the January delinquency. The entry should fall off your report by roughly July 2027. That 180-day buffer creates a uniform starting point regardless of how quickly or slowly a creditor acts.
Creditors who report the account to a bureau must include the original date of delinquency, and that date has to reflect when you first fell behind. If the debt is sold, the new collection agency must stick with the same original date. Repeatedly placing an account for collection or shuffling it between collectors does not reset anything. If a debt buyer or collector reports a later date to make the entry look newer, that practice, known as re-aging, violates the law.
Items That Stay Longer Than Seven Years
Bankruptcy
All bankruptcy filings can remain on your credit report for up to 10 years from the date of the order for relief or adjudication. This applies to Chapter 7, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, and Chapter 13. Some consumers believe Chapter 13 cases drop off after seven years, and some bureaus have voluntarily removed them sooner, but the federal statute allows up to 10 years for every chapter.
Criminal Convictions
Records of criminal convictions are carved out of the seven-year limit and can be reported indefinitely. Non-conviction dispositions like dismissals, dropped charges, and acquittals do fall under the seven-year rule, with the clock running from the date of the original charge.
High-Value Transactions
The seven-year limits can be bypassed entirely for certain large financial decisions:
- A loan or credit line with a principal amount of $150,000 or more.
- A life insurance application with a face value of $150,000 or more.
- Employment screening for a position paying $75,000 or more annually.
These thresholds are written into the statute and have not been adjusted for inflation since enactment, so they capture a much larger share of transactions today than Congress originally intended.
Tax Liens, Judgments, and Medical Debt
The FCRA still allows paid tax liens and civil judgments to appear on credit reports within the timeframes above. In practice, all three major credit bureaus stopped including tax liens and civil judgments by April 2018, after a settlement with more than 30 state attorneys general imposed stricter data quality standards for public records. The bureaus dropped these records rather than risk matching them to the wrong consumer. This is a voluntary industry practice, not a change in federal law, and the bureaus could resume reporting them if their data standards improve.
Medical collections follow the same seven-year rule as other collection accounts. In early 2025, the CFPB finalized a rule that would have largely banned medical debt from credit reports. A federal court in Texas vacated that rule in July 2025, finding it exceeded the bureau’s authority under the FCRA, so medical debt remains reportable under the standard rules. Separately, since 2023, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion have voluntarily excluded paid medical collections and unpaid medical collections under $500. Those are bureau policies, not legal requirements, and any medical collection that does appear on your report still must be removed after the seven-year period calculated from the original delinquency date.
The Credit Reporting Clock Is Not the Collection Clock
This is where most of the confusion, and most of the financial harm, happens. The seven-year reporting period and the statute of limitations for a debt collection lawsuit are two separate clocks that run independently.
The statute of limitations is a state-law deadline on how long a creditor or collector can sue you for an unpaid debt. In most states it runs three to six years, though some states allow longer. Once that period expires, a collector can no longer take you to court, but they can still contact you and ask for payment.
The dangerous part: in most states, making a partial payment or acknowledging the debt in writing can restart the statute of limitations from scratch. A debt that was legally unenforceable can suddenly become enforceable again, and collectors have no obligation to warn you before accepting your payment. So a debt might have aged off your credit report but still be legally collectible, or you might accidentally revive the legal deadline on a debt you thought was dead by sending a small good-faith payment.
If a collector contacts you about an old debt, find out whether the statute of limitations in your state has expired before making any payment or written acknowledgment. A default judgment can land on your credit report as a new entry even if the original debt has long since aged off.
How Long Positive Information Stays
The FCRA’s time limits only apply to negative information. On-time payments and accounts in good standing can remain on your credit report indefinitely, even after a loan is paid off and closed. There is no legal requirement to remove positive history, and keeping it on your report works in your favor for credit scoring.
How to Get Expired Information Removed
Start by pulling your credit reports from all three bureaus through AnnualCreditReport.com, the only site authorized by federal law for free annual reports. Look for the “Date of First Delinquency” or “Estimated Date of Removal” field on each negative entry. Compare that date to today, accounting for the 180-day offset on collections and charge-offs.
When you find an entry that should have been removed, file a dispute with the bureau reporting it. You’ll need your Social Security number, current address, a copy of a government-issued ID, the specific account number, and a clear explanation of why the entry is obsolete. The strongest disputes include a simple calculation showing the seven-year period has passed based on the dates in the report itself.
You can file online, but sending the dispute by certified mail with return receipt is better for building a paper trail. The receipt proves the date the bureau received your dispute, which matters if you need to escalate.
Once the bureau receives your dispute, it generally has 30 days to investigate. That window extends to 45 days if you filed after receiving your free annual report or if you submit additional documentation during the investigation. The bureau contacts the original creditor to verify the dates, and if the information is obsolete or cannot be verified, it must be removed. You’ll receive written notice of the results along with a free copy of your updated report.
If the Bureau Won’t Remove It
If a reporting agency keeps obsolete information on your report after the seven-year period, or violates other FCRA requirements, you can sue. For willful violations, you can recover actual damages or statutory damages between $100 and $1,000 per violation, plus punitive damages at the court’s discretion, plus attorney fees and court costs. For negligent violations, recovery is limited to actual damages plus attorney fees and court costs, with no statutory minimums or punitive damages.
The deadline to file is the earlier of two years from when you discovered the violation or five years from when the violation occurred. One caution: the statute lets courts order you to pay the defendant’s attorney fees if your suit was filed in bad faith or for harassment, so a frivolous claim can backfire.
Before litigation, you can also add a brief consumer statement to your credit file explaining the dispute. The bureau can limit it to 100 words. A statement will not change your credit score, but any future report that includes the disputed entry must note the dispute and include your statement or a summary of it. If the entry is clearly past the seven-year mark and the bureau still refuses to remove it after a properly documented dispute, the combination of a certified mail dispute, the bureau’s written refusal, and clear evidence that the reporting period has expired gives you a strong foundation for an FCRA claim.