How Long Things Stay on Your Credit Report, and What Starts the Clock

Most people know negative information comes off a credit report after about seven years. Far fewer know what the seven years runs from, and that is where the reporting errors worth disputing tend to live.

The Periods

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the general limits are:

• Most negative information: seven years. Late payments, charge-offs, collections.
• Chapter 7 bankruptcy: ten years.
• Chapter 13 bankruptcy: seven years from the filing date.
• Hard inquiries: two years, and they stop affecting most scoring models well before that.
• Closed accounts in good standing: around ten years, and they keep counting toward your length of history while they remain.

What Starts the Clock

This is the part that matters. For most negative items the period runs from the date of first delinquency — the date you first fell behind and never caught up on that account.

It does not run from:

• the date the account was charged off,
• the date it was sold to a collection agency,
• the date the collection agency first contacted you,
• or the date any agency began reporting it.

A debt sold three times still ages from the original first delinquency. An agency reporting a fresh date on a resold debt is reporting inaccurately, and that is a dispute with a factual basis rather than a matter of opinion.

How to Check Yours

Pull all three reports free at annualcreditreport.com — the site authorized under federal law, weekly, with nothing to sell you. For each negative item find the date of first delinquency and count forward. If something is still listed past its period, or the date has plainly been reset, that is worth disputing in writing.

Keep a record of what you sent and when. Under the FCRA the bureau generally has 30 days to investigate, and the furnisher has to investigate and report back too.

What Cannot Be Done

Accurate negative information cannot be removed early. Not by you, not by a lawyer, and not by anyone charging a fee to try. Any company promising to delete accurate items is describing something it cannot deliver, and credit repair is a regulated activity with specific rules about what may be claimed and when payment may be taken.

What can be corrected is inaccuracy: a wrong date, a wrong balance, a wrong status, an account that is not yours.

The Thing Waiting Does Not Do

Time removes negatives. It does not create positives.

If your file is thin as well as damaged — and plenty are both — then ageing off deals with one half of the problem and leaves the other untouched. When the negatives clear, what remains has to be something. That part only exists if an account was reporting while you waited.