How Long Does Negative Information Stay on a Credit Report?.

Most negative information comes off a credit report seven years after the delinquency that caused it, and a case under title 11 comes off after ten. Those limits are written into 15 U.S.C. § 1681c, the bureaus are supposed to apply them without being asked, and paying the balance moves neither one. What almost nobody is told is that on a collection or a charge-off the seven years do not start at the missed payment. The statute starts them 180 days later at § 1681c(c)(1), so the real window is about seven and a half years.

Roughly 77 million adults with a credit file, 35% of them, carry debt in collections (Urban Institute, 2025), and every one of those entries is running on a date its owner has never been shown. Stale data is a rare thing to file about: of the 3,482,718 complaints recorded in the CFPB’s public Consumer Complaint Database under “Incorrect information on your report” between July 2025 and June 2026, 15,883, or 0.5%, said old information reappears or never goes away, in our own analysis of that database. Those are unverified consumer allegations, and the share measures what complainants filed about, not how often a bureau misses a deadline. The argument worth having is about the date the clock counts from.

What follows is the window for each kind of item, the subsection behind it, who sets the start date and when, and what to do with an entry that outlives its own deadline. It is general information about a federal statute. Whether one item on one report is reportable today is a question for a licensed attorney reading the actual documents.

First Delinquency Is the Only Date That Starts an Account’s 7-Year Clock

The date is fixed before a collector is ever involved. A bank must charge off an open-end balance such as a credit card at 180 days past due, and a closed-end loan at 120 days (Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, 2000), so the delinquency that triggered the write-off is already months old by the time the account changes hands. Nothing downstream of it moves the date.

First delinquency means the first missed payment that was never brought current before the account defaulted, and that single rule explains the thing readers find most counterintuitive: a collection entry that appeared on the report last month can be four years into its seven-year life. The collection and the original account share one delinquency date, because the collection is downstream of it. A new tradeline is not a new clock. Two item classes do not run from a delinquency at all: a civil judgment or an arrest record runs from the date of entry under § 1681c(a)(2), and a paid tax lien from the date of payment under § 1681c(a)(3).

Under 15 U.S.C. § 1681s-2(a)(5)(A), the company that furnishes a delinquent account being placed for collection or charged to profit or loss has 90 days to tell the bureau the date of delinquency, which the statute defines as the month and year the delinquency commenced. Ninety days is generous, and the field is one a consumer can read on the report and check against their own records.

Section 1681c Gives Every Item on the Report Its Own Deadline

Ten kinds of entry, ten separate rules, and only some of them are the familiar seven years. Section 1681c lists what a consumer report may not contain, item by item, and the paragraph numbers matter because an obsolete-item dispute cites the paragraph. Two of the ten windows below are not in the statute at all and are the bureaus’ own practice, which is worth knowing before quoting either one at a bureau.

The judgment row and the lien row describe a window nothing is reporting into any more. The three nationwide bureaus applied the National Consumer Assistance Plan’s public-record standards on July 1, 2017: 6% of consumers had a civil judgment or a tax lien on their credit record in June 2017, and afterwards 1.4% had a tax lien and none had a civil judgment, with the remaining liens coming off by April 2018 (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2018). A judgment or a lien sitting on a current tri-bureau report is therefore a reporting error to dispute now, not an item waiting out a clock to year seven. Judgments and liens remain public court records and still reach specialty agencies, the tenant and employment screeners the plan never bound, which is the one place the statutory window is still the live question. Our guide to public records on credit reports covers what is left on a consumer file.

The last row is the one readers get wrong in both directions. A closed account that was always paid on time has no expiry in the law, keeps contributing its payment history, and is doing the file good. Our guide to why a closed account is still on your credit report works through why closing a card does not clear it.

Collections and Charge-Offs Get 180 Extra Days Before the 7 Years Start

The offset is written into § 1681c(c), the subsection governing when the reporting period begins, and it adds half a year to the most common negative item there is. Paragraph (1) says that for an account placed for collection, charged to profit and loss, or subjected to any similar action, the 7-year period “shall begin … upon the expiration of the 180-day period beginning on the date of the commencement of the delinquency which immediately preceded the collection activity, charge to profit and loss, or similar action.” Seven years plus 180 days from the first missed payment, then.

Work it forward with a real date. A card that first went unpaid in March 2020 starts its 180 days there, the 7-year period begins in September 2020, and the entry is reportable until about September 2027. A reader counting seven years from March 2020 expects it gone in March 2027 and spends six months convinced the bureaus are breaking the law.

The offset is also why a fall-off estimate from a collector, a credit app, or an AI answer is worth checking against the statute before acting on it. Our guides to what a charge-off is and how to remove it and to removing a collection from a credit report both work from the same start date.

A Chapter 7 Case Reports for 10 Years From the Filing Date

Ten years is the ceiling the statute writes for bankruptcy, and it is written for cases under title 11 generally. Section 1681c(a)(1) excludes cases that antedate the report by more than 10 years from the date of entry of the order for relief or the date of adjudication, which reaches a Chapter 13 filing as much as a Chapter 7. The roughly seven years a completed Chapter 13 usually shows is the bureaus’ own voluntary practice and has no statutory deadline behind it.

Underneath the public record, each account included in the case keeps its own clock. The discharged debts run their 7 years from their own first delinquencies, which is why a report can show a bankruptcy notation years after every debt inside it has already aged off. Our guides to how long bankruptcy stays on a credit report and to the credit impact of Chapter 7 against Chapter 13 set the two timelines side by side.

Hard Inquiries Come Off in 2 Years and Stop Scoring After 12 Months

Inquiries are the exception to everything above, and the shortest clock on the report. A hard inquiry from a credit application stays on a credit report for 2 years, and FICO Scores take account only of the inquiries from the preceding 12 months (FICO, 2026), so an inquiry spends its second year on the report doing nothing at all. The Fair Credit Reporting Act sets no limit on how long an inquiry may be reported, which is not the same as setting nothing: § 1681g(a)(3) obliges a bureau to disclose credit-purpose inquiries from the past year and employment-purpose inquiries from the past two. The two-year display is the bureaus’ own practice layered on that duty.

Soft inquiries are a different object again: checking your own report, or a lender running a promotional review, is visible to you and to nobody else, and never touches the score. The only inquiry worth a dispute is one you did not authorize, which is an identity-theft signal and should be challenged on that ground. Our guides to how long hard inquiries stay on a credit report and how to remove a hard inquiry cover the wording.

Paying a Collection Cuts the Balance to Zero and Never the Deadline

Federal law measures the window from the original delinquency, so a paid collection reports a zero balance for the rest of its seven years and 180 days, and a lender still sees the line. Payment updates one field and moves nothing else. There is real value in paying anyway, and the vendors publish which of their models will still read the entry. A collection reported as paid in full is disregarded by FICO Score 9 and the FICO Score 10 suite, and a settled third-party collection reported at a zero balance is treated the same way, while FICO Score 8 reads it regardless (FICO, 2026); VantageScore ignores every paid collection in 4.0, as 3.0 did before it (VantageScore, 2026). That is a scoring difference and never a removal.

Items do sometimes leave early for reasons that have nothing to do with the consumer. In April 2023 Equifax, Experian and TransUnion announced they had removed medical collection tradelines with an initial balance under $500 from US credit reports. What that left behind is measurable: as of August 2024, 4.1% of consumers, roughly 9.7 million people, still had medical debt in collections on their credit records, at a median of $1,465 owed (Urban Institute, 2025). Our guide to medical debt on credit reports covers the part the change did not reach.

Early removal otherwise runs through one of two routes, and they are not the same instrument. A goodwill request asks a creditor to delete an accurate item as a courtesy, which no furnisher is obliged to grant. A dispute challenges an item that is inaccurate, incomplete, unverifiable or too old, and carries a federal deadline behind it. Our guides to paid against unpaid collections and to writing a goodwill letter cover when each is worth sending.

Selling a Debt Cannot Restart the Clock, and Re-Aging Is the Tell

Re-aging is a delinquency date moved forward so an entry reports longer than the law allows, and it shows up most often right after a debt changes hands. The buyer has a commercial reason to report the account as fresher than it is and often has thin records to argue with. In the only federal study of the debt buying industry, the Federal Trade Commission examined nine of the largest buyers and found that creditors supplied the account opening and last payment dates but not whether a consumer had ever disputed the debt, and that most sale contracts stated the creditor did not warrant that the information was accurate (Federal Trade Commission, 2013).

Three signs, each checkable against a report you already have:

• The delinquency date moved forward after the debt was sold. The original creditor’s tradeline and the collector’s tradeline should carry the same date, because it is the same debt.
• The expected removal date keeps shifting on one account. A window that slides every time the report refreshes is a date being rewritten, not a date being corrected.
• A collector reports the date of last activity as the delinquency date. They are different fields, and only one of them starts the clock.

Keep an early copy of the report. A dated printout showing the original delinquency is the strongest answer to a date that later moves, and it is the document a dispute stands on. Our guides to debt re-aging and zombie debt work through the pattern in full, and a re-aged entry can also be reported to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at consumerfinance.gov.

The Reporting Clock and Your State’s Limitations Period Are Two Different Deadlines

A debt can be legally uncollectible in court and still sit on the report, and it happens often, because the two deadlines are set by different governments and run for different lengths. Most states set a statute of limitations on debt of three to six years, the period varies with the type of debt and the state law named in the credit agreement, and federal student loans carry none at all (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2026). Seven years plus 180 days is usually the longer of the two.

The left column is federal, and federal is the ceiling rather than the last word. Section 1681t(b)(1)(E) preempts state law on what a consumer report may contain “except that this subparagraph shall not apply to any State law in effect on September 30, 1996,” so the state reporting statutes that predate that date still bind. New York’s does: N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law § 380-j(f) bars reporting a paid collection account that antedates the report by more than five years, and a judgment satisfied within five years of entry comes off five years after that entry date, both shorter than the federal seven. Check your own state’s statute before treating the federal date as the answer.

One trap runs in the other direction. A partial payment or a written acknowledgment can restart the state limitations period even after it has expired (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2026), which means a small payment made to clear a report does nothing to the reporting date and can hand a collector a fresh right to sue. Our guides to the statute of limitations on debt by state and to responding to a debt collection lawsuit cover what to do with a demand on an old account.

Section 1681c(b) Lifts Every Limit on a $150,000 Loan or a $75,000 Job

The seven-year and ten-year limits stop applying above a dollar threshold, and there are two of them: $150,000 on a credit transaction or a life insurance policy, and $75,000 of annual salary on an employment screen. Section 1681c(b) disapplies paragraphs (1) through (5) entirely where the report is pulled in connection with a credit transaction of $150,000 or more, a life insurance policy with a face amount of $150,000 or more, or employment at an annual salary of $75,000 or more. A ten-year-old bankruptcy is lawfully reportable on a $150,000 mortgage file that would be obsolete on a car loan.

This is the honest answer to whether anything can legally stay past seven years, and Congress wrote the exemption into the Fair Credit Reporting Act itself. It also means the removal date on a report is the date for ordinary consumer credit, and an ordinary mortgage or a $75,000 job offer is where to expect the older history to still be visible. Neither figure is indexed to anything, so both catch more files every year that prices and salaries rise.

An Item Past Its Window Is Disputable Under § 1681c on Age Alone

An obsolete entry needs no argument about the underlying facts. Where the window has run, the item exceeds the limits of § 1681c and the bureau has to delete it, whether or not the debt was real and whether or not it was ever paid. That is the cleanest dispute in the statute, because the only thing in contention is arithmetic. Obsolete entries do survive their windows, and the regulator has measured it where the files are worst: reviewing 17 tenant screening companies, the CFPB found many examples of screening reports carrying statutorily prohibited obsolete information, including non-conviction criminal records more than seven years old, and found that the screening companies and their data brokers may lack procedures to assure removal of records that were expunged, sealed or obsolete (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2022).

1. Pull all three reports from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, because each bureau keeps its own file and an item removed at one can keep reporting at the other two.
2. Read the date of first delinquency on the tradeline, and compare the collector’s date against the original creditor’s date for the same debt.
3. Compute the removal date: 7 years plus 180 days from that delinquency for a collection or charge-off, 7 years for most other adverse items, 10 years for a title 11 case.
4. Cite § 1681c and the paragraph in the letter, state the date you computed and the date the report shows, and attach whatever document fixes the delinquency.
5. Diary the investigation window: a bureau must complete a reasonable reinvestigation within 30 days, extended to 45 where you supply relevant information during those 30 days (Fair Credit Reporting Act, Section 611).
6. Collect what the bureau owes at the end: written results, a consumer report from your file as revised by the reinvestigation, and, on request, a description of the procedure it used including the name, address and telephone number of the furnisher it contacted, which § 1681i(a)(7) gives it 15 days to supply.
7. Re-pull all three reports and check the entry is gone from each of them rather than from the one you disputed with. An item that comes back verified is escalated, not accepted: dispute it again with the document that fixes the delinquency date, and say in the letter what the last reinvestigation failed to check.

Step 2 is the one that carries the work, and a tool that skips it leaves the reader to catch the date alone. Candace H., a 1-star reviewer writing about Dispute Beast on June 28, 2026, had to catch the date on her own: “it was over 7 yrs old…” An obsolete entry is only obvious once somebody reads the date behind it. Our guides to disputing a credit report error and to the three FCRA words that force items off a report cover the wording, and a deleted item that reappears covers the certification a bureau owes you before it puts one back.

Removing an Inaccurate Item Helps, and the Gain Drops as the Item Ages

The size of the change depends on the file it comes out of, not on the item alone. A recent collection sitting on an otherwise clean report weighs more than an old one buried among several other marks, so two people deleting the same kind of entry can see very different movement. Anyone quoting a point figure for a specific deletion is quoting a number they cannot know.

Scoring models pull in different directions on the same data. FICO Score 8 counts a paid collection, FICO Score 9, the FICO Score 10 suite and VantageScore 4.0 disregard one (FICO, 2026; VantageScore, 2026), and medical items are handled differently again, so one removal can read larger under one model than another. Lenders choose which model they buy, and the Credit Repair Organizations Act bars any service from promising you a number before they do.

That is why the work is the documented corrections, taken together, one field at a time. Our guide to 5 things on your credit report you can legally dispute right now is the list to start from. Nobody can price the result before it happens.

The 7-Year Deadline Runs Itself; the Start Date Is the Part You Check

The deletion at the end of the window is written to run without being asked. Section 1681c bars a consumer reporting agency from including an item once its period has expired, and no letter is required to make that true. What the statute cannot do on its own is verify the date it counts from, because that date is furnished by the company reporting the item and is only as good as the records behind it.

So the one number worth reading on a negative tradeline is the date of first delinquency. Add 180 days if it is a collection or a charge-off, add seven years, and you have the day it is due to go. Where the report disagrees with that arithmetic, the disagreement is the dispute.

Compare tools for checking an old entry’s dates

Keeping track of old entries can mean more than watching one account. In CreditRefresh’s September 18, 2026 data, paying members had a median of 25 negative entries across the bureaus. The same debt can appear more than once, and the count does not tell us which entries are wrong or too old. Compare tools on the help they give you to check dates and challenge an item that has stayed too long.

Every price is that company’s own published rate, read off that company’s own site on September 15, 2026. Trustpilot scores and review counts as published on September 24, 2026.

For an old debt, read the letter before it goes out and check which date it names. A collection’s transfer date is not the date that starts its reporting clock. Keep the records that support the date you are asking the bureau to use.

Get help with an old entry that should no longer be reported with CreditRefresh

You may have spent years paying on time while one old debt still sits on your report. CreditRefresh helps you check that entry across all three bureaus. If a date is wrong or an item is too old to report, we draft a letter for you to review and sign. You choose what to challenge and can check the dates against your own records.

Later reports show whether the item is still there. In our paying-member data, 47.9% of disputed items with a recorded outcome no longer appeared on a later report from the same bureau. Outcomes were recorded for 2.3% of items in mailed rounds in our September 18, 2026 data, across all dispute types. You can keep checking the old entry as you build a new record of paying on time.

Badtank, 5 star, July 28, 2026, on Trustpilot: “They showed me debt I didn’t even know about…” Becca, 5 star, July 25, 2026, on Trustpilot: “…it instantly pulled up my reports and flagged the things that were bringing down my credit score so that I could review and address those problem areas…”

CreditRefresh comes with Refresh Monitoring for $49.99 a month, with no setup fee, no per-dispute charge and no contract. You can cancel any time. As you rebuild credit, monitoring helps you keep track of the old entries you challenged alongside the rest of your file.

It is backed by our 100% money-back guarantee: members who work the full program and see no bureau score rise above where they started can claim back every Refresh Monitoring payment. It is a refund promise, never a score promise.

Frequently asked questions

Does bad credit disappear after 7 years?

The entries do; the consequences of the years they were on the file do not vanish with them. Once a negative item passes its window the bureaus drop it and it stops being scored, but a thin file left behind by the deletions can still read as high risk to a lender. Rebuilding after a fall-off is its own piece of work.

Can I have a 700 credit score with late payments?

Yes. Payment history is the largest single input but it is not the only one, so an old isolated late payment sitting beside low utilization, long account age and a clean recent record can leave a score in the 700s. Recent and repeated lates are the ones that hold a score down.

Can a collection more than 10 years old appear on my report as a new account?

It should not, and when it does the age of the underlying debt is the answer. A buyer opening a fresh tradeline does not create a fresh delinquency date, so an entry whose original delinquency is more than 7 years and 180 days old is obsolete no matter how recently it was added. Dispute it under § 1681c on age.

Do all three bureaus drop the same item on the same day?

Not reliably, because each bureau keeps its own file and receives its own data from the furnisher. An item can expire at Equifax and keep reporting at TransUnion for weeks, or sit at one bureau with a delinquency date the other two do not have. Always re-pull all three before deciding an entry has gone.

Does a closed account in good standing count against me?

No, and § 1681c puts no clock on it at all. A closed account that was always paid on time can stay on the report for a decade or more and keeps contributing its payment history and its age, both of which help. Only a closed account carrying a negative history, such as a charge-off, works against the file.

Do the bureaus have to notify me when an item falls off?

No. Nothing in § 1681c requires a bureau to tell you an item has expired, and there is no letter or alert that arrives on the day it goes. Checking the report yourself, at all three bureaus, is the only way to confirm a removal actually happened.

Does a Chapter 13 I did not complete still fall off in 7 years?

Not necessarily, and this is where the bureaus’ practice and the statute part company. The 7-year treatment is a voluntary convention applied to a completed repayment plan; a dismissed Chapter 13 is still a case under title 11, and § 1681c(a)(1) permits reporting for 10 years from the order for relief. Check which one your report is showing.

Last reviewed: September 2026

This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal or financial advice. The Fair Credit Reporting Act and related regulations are complex, and outcomes depend on individual circumstances. Consumers with specific questions about their credit reports or rights under federal law should consult a licensed attorney or contact the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau directly.

CreditRefresh reads the delinquency date behind every negative entry on all three reports, which is the field that decides when the entry is due to leave. Connecting your reports takes a few minutes, and the first scan is ready the same day. Backed by a 100% money-back guarantee.

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