The statutes of limitations under TILA, RESPA, and ECOA run from one year to five years, and which one applies depends on the statute and the specific violation. The Truth in Lending Act gives you one year to sue for disclosure errors and up to three years to rescind certain home loans. The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act splits its clock: one year for kickbacks and forced title insurance, three years for loan servicing failures. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act allows five years for discrimination claims. Miss the deadline and you almost always lose the right to sue for damages, though TILA violations can still be raised as a defense if the lender comes after you.
TILA: One Year for Damages, Three Years for Rescission
If a lender misstated the annual percentage rate, finance charges, or the amount financed, you have one year from the date of the violation to file suit for damages.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1640 – Civil Liability For closed-end credit secured by your home, statutory damages run from $400 to $4,000 per individual action even without proof of a specific dollar loss, and you can add actual damages, attorney fees, and costs on top.
In class actions, statutory damages are capped at the lesser of $1,000,000 or one percent of the creditor’s net worth, and that ceiling covers the whole class.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1640 – Civil Liability
The Three-Year Rescission Right
Rescission is a stronger remedy with a longer clock. When a lender takes a security interest in your primary residence and fails to deliver the required disclosures or notice of your right to cancel, the standard three-business-day cooling-off period extends to three years.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1635 – Right of Rescission as to Certain Transactions A successful rescission unwinds the transaction and forces the lender to return interest and fees paid over the life of the loan.
Two limits define this right. Rescission does not apply to purchase-money mortgages, only to refinances, home equity loans, and home equity lines of credit.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1635 – Right of Rescission as to Certain Transactions And the three-year deadline is absolute. In Beach v. Ocwen Federal Bank, the Supreme Court held that the right of rescission is completely extinguished after three years, with no extensions and no ability to raise it defensively.3Legal Information Institute. Beach v. Ocwen Fed. Bank, 523 U.S. 410 (1998)
You don’t have to file suit within three years to preserve the right, though. In Jesinoski v. Countrywide Home Loans, the Supreme Court held that written notice to the lender within the three-year window is enough to exercise rescission.4Justia Law. Jesinoski v. Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., 574 U.S. 259 (2015) Litigation may follow if the lender pushes back, but the act of rescinding is complete when the notice lands on time.
RESPA: One Year or Three Years, Depending on the Violation
One Year for Kickbacks and Title Insurance
RESPA Section 8 bars kickbacks and fee-splitting among settlement service providers. Section 9 bars sellers from requiring buyers to buy title insurance from a specific company. Both claims carry a one-year statute of limitations from the date of the violation.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 12 USC 2614 – Jurisdiction of Courts; Limitations
The civil payoff on a Section 8 claim is three times the amount of the tainted charge you paid.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 12 USC 2607 – Prohibition Against Kickbacks and Unearned Fees Treble damages can make even a modest referral fee worth pursuing, but only if you file inside the one-year window.
Three Years for Loan Servicing Problems
RESPA Section 6 claims about how your loan is serviced get a three-year clock.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 12 USC 2614 – Jurisdiction of Courts; Limitations Typical claims involve a servicer’s mishandling of a qualified written request, missed notice of a servicing transfer, or botched payment processing.
The response timelines built into the statute define much of what counts as a violation. A servicer must acknowledge a qualified written request within five business days and provide a substantive response within thirty business days, extendable by fifteen days only if the servicer notifies you before the original thirty days expire. Individuals can recover actual damages plus up to $2,000 in additional statutory damages on proof of a pattern of noncompliance.7Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 12 USC 2605 – Servicing of Mortgage Loans and Administration of Escrow Accounts
The split matters in practice. A closing-day kickback and a payment-transfer error eighteen months later run on different clocks. The kickback claim may already be dead while the servicing claim still has room to move.
ECOA: Five Years for Discrimination Claims
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act gives you five years from the date of the violation to file a civil action, the longest window of the three statutes.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1691e – Civil Liability Lending discrimination is often invisible at the point of denial and only surfaces later, which is part of the reason the clock runs longer.
Punitive damages in individual cases are capped at $10,000, separate from actual damages.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1691e – Civil Liability Actual damages, which can include lost housing opportunities and higher borrowing costs from alternative lenders, are where the recovery often sits.
One extension is worth knowing. If a federal enforcement agency or the Attorney General sues the lender within the five-year window, borrowers who were victims of the same discrimination get an additional year from the start of that government action to file their own claim.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1691e – Civil Liability The extension runs only while the government’s case is live, and you still have to file within twelve months of when it began.
When the Clock Starts
The default rule under all three statutes is that the clock starts on the date the violation occurred. For most mortgage claims, that means the closing date: when the disclosures were (or weren’t) delivered, when the referral fee changed hands, when the discriminatory denial was issued.
Some courts apply a discovery rule that delays the start of the clock when a violation wasn’t reasonably apparent at the time, pushing the start to when you discovered or should have discovered it through reasonable diligence. This is not available everywhere or for every claim, and courts scrutinize whether you had enough information to investigate sooner.
Equitable tolling can also pause the clock when a lender actively concealed the misconduct. The bar is high. Not knowing about a legal right isn’t enough; you need to show affirmative steps to hide the violation, such as falsified documents or misrepresentations about the loan’s terms.
TILA Violations Can Still Be a Defense After the Deadline
A TILA violation doesn’t fully disappear when the one-year window closes. If a lender or debt collector sues you to collect, including through foreclosure, you can raise the violation defensively through recoupment or set-off.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1640 – Civil Liability That won’t let you sue the lender or collect damages, but it can reduce or eliminate what the lender says you owe.
Ability-to-repay violations reach further. Borrowers facing foreclosure can assert those violations as a defense with no time limit, and the offset equals the full damages amount that a timely lawsuit would have produced, including attorney fees.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1640 – Civil Liability When recoupment is asserted after the one-year damages window has already closed, the statutory damages component is calculated only through the day before the deadline ran, while actual damages and ability-to-repay damages remain fully available.
RESPA has no equivalent express recoupment provision. Some jurisdictions may allow RESPA-based offsets on equitable grounds, but the statute itself doesn’t preserve the right after the filing deadline. If your only viable claims are under RESPA and the clock has run, an attorney familiar with your circuit is the right next step.
What Missing the Deadline Actually Costs
Courts enforce these deadlines strictly. A TILA damages claim filed at thirteen months, a RESPA kickback claim at fourteen months, an ECOA claim at year six: each will draw a motion to dismiss that the lender is likely to win. Judges have no discretion to extend the windows because the violation was serious or because you didn’t know the deadline existed.
The cost isn’t only a lost payout. A homeowner in foreclosure who let a TILA disclosure violation go stale may have lost the ability to offset the debt. A borrower who spots discriminatory lending too late forfeits both damages and the settlement leverage that a live ECOA claim would have supplied. Given how short some of these windows are, especially TILA’s one-year damages clock, waiting to see how things play out is one of the more expensive mistakes in a consumer credit dispute.
If you suspect a violation, document it now. Keep the original closing documents, save every communication with the lender and servicer, and record the dates. Preserving that evidence inside the filing window is what keeps your options open, whether you decide to sue, negotiate, or raise the issue defensively later.