How Long Can a Creditor Report Bad Debt: 7-Year Rule and Exceptions

Under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, a creditor or credit bureau can report most bad debt for seven years from the date you first became delinquent. Bankruptcies get up to ten years, medical debt follows its own rules, and a handful of situations lift the limit entirely. The details on when the clock starts matter a great deal, because a small misunderstanding can leave an old account on your report months longer than it should be.

The Seven-Year Rule

The FCRA bars credit bureaus from including most negative information on your report once it is more than seven years old. That covers the entries people worry about: late payments, accounts sent to collections, charge-offs (where a creditor writes your account off as a loss), repossessions, and foreclosures.¹

The practical damage usually fades well before seven years are up. A collection account from five years ago hurts your score far less than one from five months ago. The entry is still visible to lenders, but scoring models weigh recent behavior much more heavily, so time works in your favor even before the item drops off.

When the Clock Actually Starts

For accounts that were charged off or sent to collections, the seven-year countdown begins 180 days after the date your delinquency began, not from the charge-off date or the date a collection agency picked up the account.¹ The total window from your first missed payment to the reporting deadline runs roughly seven years and six months.

Here is the scenario that trips people up. You miss a payment in January, never catch up, and the creditor charges the account off in July. The seven-year clock does not start from the July charge-off. It starts 180 days after your January delinquency began. That buffer gives the original creditor time to report the default and lets the account work its way through collection, but the charge-off itself does not reset anything.

The same principle applies when debt changes hands. If your original creditor sells the account to a collection agency, the new collector inherits the original delinquency date. Making a payment on old debt or acknowledging the balance does not restart the seven-year reporting clock. Any creditor or collector who reports a later start date to make the debt look newer is violating the law.

Bankruptcy Runs Ten Years

The FCRA allows bankruptcy filings to remain on your credit report for up to ten years from the filing date.¹ The statute does not distinguish between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13, but the major bureaus typically remove Chapter 13 filings after seven years because those cases involve a repayment plan. Chapter 7 filings stay the full ten.

Bankruptcies are now the only type of public record that appears on bureau credit reports. The three major bureaus voluntarily stopped including civil judgments in mid-2017 and finished removing tax liens by April 2018.²

Medical Debt Follows Different Rules

Medical debt does not sit cleanly inside the seven-year rule. In 2022 and 2023, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion voluntarily stopped reporting medical collections that have been paid in full, and they removed unpaid medical collections with balances under $500.³ Those changes cleared roughly 70 percent of medical collection entries from consumer credit files.

A CFPB rule that would have banned all medical debt from credit reports was vacated by a federal court in July 2025, so the broader ban is off the table.⁴ The voluntary bureau changes stand. If you have medical debt in collections, paying it off should cause it to disappear from your report, and any unpaid balance under $500 should not appear at all.

Veterans have extra protection written into the FCRA itself. Medical debt from VA hospital care cannot be reported until at least one year after care was provided, and fully paid or settled veteran medical debt cannot be reported at all.¹

When the Seven-Year Limit Doesn’t Apply

The time restrictions drop away for certain high-value transactions. A lender can pull a report showing older negative items when you apply for:

Credit of $150,000 or more, such as a mortgage.
Life insurance with a face amount of $150,000 or more.
Employment at an annual salary of $75,000 or more.

These thresholds sit in the statute and are not adjusted for inflation.⁵ For a mortgage application in particular, assume anything in your financial history is fair game for the lender to see.

Defaulted federal student loans follow the ordinary seven-year rule using the original delinquency date, and enrolling in a repayment program or consolidating the loan does not restart the clock.⁶

How Long You Can Be Reported Isn’t How Long You Can Be Sued

Two separate clocks run on any unpaid debt, and confusing them can be expensive. The credit reporting period, set by the FCRA, runs seven years no matter what state you live in. The statute of limitations for a creditor to sue you is set by state law, and it varies. Most states set the window between three and six years for credit card and other consumer debts, though a few allow as long as ten or fifteen years for certain written contracts.⁷

The credit reporting clock cannot be restarted. The statute of limitations often can. In many states, making even a small partial payment on an old debt, or acknowledging it in writing, can restart the entire limitations period and give the creditor a fresh window to sue.⁷ A collector who calls asking for $20 as a gesture of good faith on an old account may be trying to reset that lawsuit clock. Before paying or writing anything acknowledging an old debt, know where you stand under your state’s statute of limitations.

Removing Outdated Debt From Your Report

If a negative item on your report is older than the allowed period, you can get it removed for free. File a dispute with each bureau that shows the outdated information: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. Disputes can go through their websites or by mail.⁸

Identify the specific account and explain that it has exceeded the maximum reporting period under the FCRA. Include copies of any documentation supporting your claim, such as old account statements showing the original delinquency date or earlier credit reports where the same account shows an earlier date. Send copies and keep the originals.⁹

Once you submit a dispute, the bureau has 30 days to investigate. That window extends to 45 days if you send additional supporting information after filing.¹⁰ If the investigation confirms the item is obsolete or cannot be verified, the bureau must remove it. You do not need a credit repair company for any of this; the process is built for consumers to use directly.

Watch for Illegal Re-aging

Re-aging is when a creditor or collector reports a false, later delinquency date to make an old debt look newer. It is illegal, and the FTC requires companies that furnish information to credit bureaus to have written policies against it.¹¹ The most common moment for dates to shift is when a debt is sold from one collector to another.

If you pull your credit report and a collection account shows a more recent delinquency date than you expected, compare it against your own records. The date of first delinquency should trace back to when you originally fell behind with the first creditor, not when a later collector purchased the account. A mismatch is worth disputing, and if the bureau responds that the item is accurate and within the reporting window using a date that does not match your records, that is the kind of problem to escalate to the CFPB or FTC.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681c – Requirements Relating to Information Contained in Consumer Reports
2
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A New Retrospective on the Removal of Public Records
3
TransUnion. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion Remove Medical Collections Debt Under $500 From US Credit Reports
4
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. CFPB Finalizes Rule to Remove Medical Bills from Credit Reports
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681c – Requirements Relating to Information Contained in Consumer Reports – Section: Exempted Cases
6
Federal Student Aid. A Fresh Start for Borrowers With Federal Student Loans in Default
7
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Can Debt Collectors Collect a Debt That’s Several Years Old?
8
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. How Do I Dispute an Error on My Credit Report?
9
Federal Trade Commission. Disputing Errors on Your Credit Reports
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681i – Procedure in Case of Disputed Accuracy
11
Federal Trade Commission. Consumer Reports: What Information Furnishers Need to Know