How Long Negative Items Stay on Your Credit Report
Every negative item has a legally defined expiration date. Knowing the exact timelines tells you what’s worth acting on, what’s about to age off on its own — and when a reported date is wrong.
The standard: seven years
Most negative information — late payments, charge-offs, collections, repossessions, foreclosures, settled accounts — must be removed no later than seven years from the date of first delinquency (DOFD): the first missed payment after which the account never returned to current. Paying a collection does not restart this clock.
The exceptions
Chapter 7 bankruptcy stays ten years from the filing date; Chapter 13 typically seven. Hard inquiries stay two years but generally only affect scores for about twelve months. Defaulted federal student loans follow their own federal rules. And since the bureaus’ 2017–2018 data standards changes, tax liens and most civil judgments no longer appear on the big three’s consumer reports at all — if one shows on yours, that itself is worth a dispute.
Collections run on the original account’s clock
A collection falls off based on the DOFD of the original debt — not when the agency bought it, opened its file, or last contacted you. A collection reporting a DOFD later than the original account’s is re-aged and disputable. This is one of the most consequential fields on the entire report, and one of the most frequently wrong.
Aging off vs. score impact
An item’s score impact fades before it disappears. A five-year-old late payment hurts far less than a five-month-old one, and scoring models weight recent behavior heavily. That means recent negatives are usually worth more attention than old ones — and an item aging off within a few months may not be worth any action at all.
The reporting window is not the debt
When an item ages off your report, the underlying debt doesn’t vanish — collection attempts can continue subject to your state’s statute of limitations on lawsuits, which is a separate, usually shorter clock. Reporting limits, lawsuit limits, and moral obligation are three different things; conflating them leads to expensive mistakes in both directions.
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