When Do Accounts Get Removed From Your Credit Report?

How long accounts stay on your credit report depends on what kind of item it is. Most negative accounts come off seven years after the original delinquency. Bankruptcies can stay up to ten years. Hard inquiries drop off after two. Accounts you closed in good standing usually hang around for about a decade and help your score while they do. These limits come from the Fair Credit Reporting Act and apply across Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.¹

Late Payments, Collections, and Charge-Offs

Late payments, accounts sent to collections, and charge-offs all follow the same rule: up to seven years on your report.¹ The starting point is not the date a creditor charged off the account or handed it to a collector. It’s 180 days after the first missed payment that you never caught up on. That 180-day buffer pushes the actual removal date to roughly seven and a half years after your original delinquency.²

That start date is locked. Selling the debt to a new collector or transferring it between creditors doesn’t restart the clock. Reporting a fresh delinquency date on an old account is called re-aging, and Regulation V requires furnishers to have policies preventing it when accounts change hands.³

A quick example. You miss a credit card payment in January and never bring the account current. The issuer charges off the balance about six months later. Your seven-year reporting window starts 180 days after that January miss, roughly late June or early July, and runs seven years from there. The same math applies to collection accounts of every kind, not just credit cards.

Bankruptcies

The FCRA lets bankruptcy filings stay on your report for up to ten years from the date of the order for relief, which is usually the filing date.¹ The statute doesn’t separate Chapter 7 from Chapter 13. In practice, the three major bureaus remove Chapter 13 filings after seven years because those cases involve a completed repayment plan, while Chapter 7 filings sit for the full ten.

The individual debts inside a bankruptcy have their own timelines. A credit card discharged in your case still drops off seven years after its original delinquency, even if the bankruptcy notation itself is still visible. It’s normal to see the bankruptcy on your report after the accounts it covered are already gone.

A dismissed bankruptcy can still be reported for the full ten years. The statute ties the clock to the filing date, not the outcome, so a case that ended without a discharge stays visible just as long as one that succeeded.⁴

Hard Inquiries

A hard inquiry lands on your report when you apply for credit and the lender pulls your file. The FCRA requires bureaus to disclose who accessed your report during the prior year for non-employment purposes and the prior two years for employment.² In practice the major bureaus display hard inquiries for two years. The scoring impact fades much faster, usually within about 12 months.

Soft inquiries, like checking your own credit or a pre-screened offer, don’t appear on reports pulled by other lenders and don’t affect your score.

Shopping for a mortgage or auto loan is treated differently. Scoring models group multiple inquiries for the same loan type inside a short window and count them as one event. Older FICO versions use 14 days; newer versions use 45. The inquiries still show individually on your report, but the score math treats them as a single hit.

Closed Accounts in Good Standing

Positive information doesn’t have a federal removal deadline. The CFPB notes that credit reporting companies may report positive information for longer than negative information.⁵ The major bureaus generally keep closed accounts you paid on time for about ten years from the last activity or closure date.

That decade helps you. It stretches your credit age and shows a track record of steady repayment. A car loan you paid off in 2020 will keep working for your profile until around 2030. When those old positive lines finally age off, your score can dip a bit if they were among your oldest accounts.

Public Records and Medical Debt

The FCRA still permits civil judgments to be reported for seven years from entry (or until the statute of limitations expires, whichever is longer) and paid tax liens for seven years from the payment date.¹ In practice, none of these appear on reports from the three major bureaus anymore. Under the National Consumer Assistance Plan, the bureaus required public records to include a name, address, and either a Social Security number or date of birth, refreshed every 90 days.⁶ Most court records couldn’t meet those standards, so civil judgments were pulled in 2017 and tax liens were gone from the three national bureaus by April 2018.⁷ Bankruptcy is the only public record type the major bureaus still list.

Medical debt sits in its own category. In 2022 the three bureaus voluntarily stopped reporting paid medical collections and stopped listing unpaid medical debt less than a year old. The CFPB tried to remove medical debt from credit reports entirely, but a federal court vacated that rule in July 2025.⁸ Unpaid medical collections older than a year can still appear and follow the same seven-year timeline from the original delinquency.

When Old Items Can Come Back

The seven- and ten-year limits have an exception that catches people off guard. They don’t apply when a report is pulled for:

A credit transaction with a principal amount of $150,000 or more.
Underwriting a life insurance policy with a face amount of $150,000 or more.
A job with an annual salary of $75,000 or more.

For those uses, the bureau can report your full history, including items that would otherwise have aged off.² So a 12-year-old bankruptcy or a 9-year-old collection can resurface on a jumbo mortgage or a higher-paying job application. These dollar thresholds haven’t been adjusted for inflation, so they sweep in more transactions now than when they were written.

Disputing an Item That Should Be Gone

If a negative item stays past its removal date, dispute it with the credit bureau. The bureau has 30 days to investigate, or up to 45 days if you filed the dispute after requesting your free annual report or added information mid-investigation.⁹ If the information can’t be verified, it has to come off.

File the dispute with the furnisher too, meaning the original creditor or the collection agency. Both have obligations under the FCRA to investigate and correct inaccurate reporting, and if the furnisher keeps reporting a disputed item, it must tell the bureau so your file notes the dispute.¹⁰ When a bureau or furnisher willfully keeps reporting something it knows is wrong, the FCRA gives you the right to sue for damages and attorney’s fees.¹¹

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681c – Requirements Relating to Information Contained in Consumer Reports
2
Federal Trade Commission. Fair Credit Reporting Act
3
eCFR. Part 1022 – Fair Credit Reporting (Regulation V)
4
United States Bankruptcy Court Eastern District of Missouri. FAQ – Credit Reporting and the Bankruptcy Court
5
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. How Long Does Information Stay on My Credit Report?
6
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Removal of Public Records Has Little Effect on Consumers’ Credit Scores
7
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A New Retrospective on the Removal of Public Records
8
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. CFPB Finalizes Rule to Remove Medical Bills From Credit Reports
9
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. How Long Does It Take to Repair an Error on a Credit Report?
10
Federal Trade Commission. Disputing Errors on Your Credit Reports
11
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681n – Civil Liability for Willful Noncompliance