How Long Do Collections Stay on Your Credit Report?

Seven years and 180 days. That's the outer limit on how long a collection account can be reported, and almost everyone measures it from the wrong day.

It does not start when the collector first called you. Not when the account was charged off, not when the debt was sold, and not when the collection tradeline was opened. It starts on the date of first delinquency: the month you fell behind on the original account and never got current again.

Get that date right and you can predict, almost to the month, when this disappears.

What starts the seven-year clock?

The Fair Credit Reporting Act sets the limit in two pieces that have to be read together.

Section 1681c(a)(4) bars a credit reporting agency from including "accounts placed for collection or charged to profit and loss which antedate the report by more than seven years." Section 1681c(c)(1) then says exactly when that seven-year period begins: upon the expiration of a 180-day period that starts on "the date of the commencement of the delinquency which immediately preceded the collection activity, charge to profit and loss, or similar action."

So the math is 180 days first, then seven years.

Say your last on-time payment to Discover was April 2024 and you never caught up. April 2024 is the date of first delinquency. The 180 days run out around October 2024, the seven years run from there, and the outer limit lands around October 2031. Everything that grows out of that account inherits the same date. If Portfolio Recovery Associates buys the debt in 2027 and opens its own tradeline, that tradeline still has to come off on the original account's schedule.

Portfolio Recovery Associates

Account ****7310 · Reported since Jan 2025

1

Account type

Collection2

Original creditor

Discover Bank

Balance

$4,1803

Date of first delinquency

Apr 20244

Scheduled removal

Oct 2031

Original account, last 24 months

5

On timeReported late

1. 1

   Who is reporting it

   The debt buyer, not the card issuer. The original Discover account usually sits elsewhere on the report as a charge-off, on the same clock.

2. 2

   Account type is the damage

   Scoring models react to the word "collection." The size of the balance matters far less than most people assume.

3. 3

   The balance can move

   Interest and fees may keep accruing after a sale if the original agreement allowed it. Asking for an itemization forces the collector to show its work.

4. 4

   The only date worth checking

   Compare it against your own records. Every removal date on this account is calculated from here, so an error here shifts years.

5. 5

   Where the date comes from

   The original account's late months. The first one that never got cured is the date of first delinquency.

Illustrative tradeline. Field names vary slightly by bureau; Equifax and TransUnion label it date of first delinquency, Experian uses a similar term.

One wrinkle worth knowing: in practice the bureaus tend to purge at seven years, not seven years and 180 days. FICO's own consumer education states flatly that third-party collection accounts stay "seven years from the original delinquency date." Treat seven years as the realistic expectation and the extra 180 days as the legal ceiling, not a promise.

If none of this matches what you're seeing, it's usually because you're looking at two entries for one debt. That's normal, and what happens after a debt goes to collections walks through why the original account and the collection show up separately.

Does selling or paying the debt change the date?

No. Neither one moves it, and this is where a lot of bad information circulates.

When a furnisher reports a delinquent account that's been placed for collection or charged off, section 1681s-2(a)(5) requires it to tell the bureau the date of delinquency within 90 days, and specifies what that date has to be: "the month and year of the commencement of the delinquency on the account that immediately preceded the action." The statute deliberately anchors the date to the original account so that reselling a debt can't buy anyone extra years.

Collectors sometimes report it wrong anyway. A tradeline from Midland Credit Management or LVNV Funding that shows a date of first delinquency two years after you actually stopped paying is called re-aging, and it's a reporting error, not a rule you have to live with. So is a suspiciously recent "date opened" attached to a debt you know is old. Both are worth disputing, and both are easier to prove when you know who actually owns the debt and can trace it back to the original creditor.

Paying changes the status, not the date

A paid collection stays put. The balance goes to zero and the status changes to "paid," and that's the whole of it.

What that status change is worth depends entirely on which scoring model a lender runs. Per FICO's own documentation, collections reported as paid in full are disregarded by FICO Score 9 and the FICO Score 10 suite, and collections with an original amount under $100 are disregarded by FICO 8 as well. VantageScore says models it has introduced since 2013, which includes VantageScore 4.0, ignore paid collections too.

FICO 8 is the exception that matters, because it's still the workhorse in a great deal of consumer lending. Under FICO 8 a paid collection is scored like an unpaid one.

The practical read: paying helps most when a specific lender is about to pull your file and you know which model they use, and helps least as an abstract score-repair plan. If you're weighing it, what a settlement is realistically worth is the better place to start than a scoring table.

How long does everything else stay on your report?

Collections aren't the only thing on a clock, and the clocks don't match.

Item	How long it can be reported	When the clock starts
Collection account	7 years + 180 days	First delinquency on the original account
Charge-off on the original account	7 years + 180 days	That same first delinquency
Late payment (30, 60, 90+ days)	7 years	The month the payment was late
Bankruptcy, Chapter 7 or 13	Up to 10 years	The date the case was filed
Civil judgments and tax liens	Not reported at all any more	No clock: the bureaus removed them in 2017–2018

• ItemCollection account

  How long it can be reported

  7 years + 180 days

  When the clock starts

  First delinquency on the original account

• ItemCharge-off on the original account

  How long it can be reported

  7 years + 180 days

  When the clock starts

  That same first delinquency

• ItemLate payment (30, 60, 90+ days)

  How long it can be reported

  7 years

  When the clock starts

  The month the payment was late

• ItemBankruptcy, Chapter 7 or 13

  How long it can be reported

  Up to 10 years

  When the clock starts

  The date the case was filed

• ItemCivil judgments and tax liens

  How long it can be reported

  Not reported at all any more

  When the clock starts

  No clock: the bureaus removed them in 2017–2018

15 U.S.C. § 1681c(a); CFPB, How long does information stay on my credit report? (September 2025); CFPB, A new retrospective on the removal of public records (December 2019).

The judgment row surprises people. Under the statute, judgments could be reported for seven years or until the governing statute of limitations expired, whichever was longer. Then the bureaus adopted stricter identification standards for public records under their National Consumer Assistance Plan, and the CFPB found those standards removed all civil judgments and almost half of tax liens from consumer reports in July 2017. By April 2018, none of the remaining tax liens survived either. A judgment against you is still a public record with real consequences. It just isn't on your credit report.

Are medical collections treated differently?

Yes, and the reason is not what most articles say.

The CFPB finalized a rule in January 2025 that would have barred medical debt from consumer reports entirely. It never took effect. On July 11, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas vacated it in Cornerstone Credit Union League v. CFPB, and the Bureau's own rule page now describes the materials as reference only. If you read somewhere that medical debt is banned from credit reports by federal regulation, that's the vacated rule.

What is actually in force is a set of voluntary changes the three nationwide bureaus announced themselves in March 2022:

• Paid medical collections have been excluded from consumer reports since July 1, 2022.
• The wait before an unpaid medical collection can appear went from six months to a full year.
• Medical collections under $500 stopped being reported in the first half of 2023.

The bureaus estimated those changes would remove close to 70% of medical collection tradelines. Because they're company policies rather than law, they can change without a rulemaking, and they don't alter the seven-year rule for the medical collections that do get reported. VantageScore 3.0 and 4.0 go further and exclude medical collection data from the score calculation regardless of amount or age.

What if a collection doesn't fall off on schedule?

Removal is supposed to be automatic. Sometimes it isn't, particularly on debts that have been resold more than once.

Start by pulling all three reports at AnnualCreditReport.com, the official free-report site, and read them side by side. An account can age off Equifax and linger on TransUnion. Find the date of first delinquency on each version of the account and compare it to your own records, old statements, and any validation notice you kept.

If the date is wrong or the item has outlived its period, dispute it with each bureau still reporting it. Do it in writing, name the specific tradeline, state the correct date of first delinquency, attach whatever proves it, and send it so you have evidence of when you sent it. The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires the bureau to investigate and to delete information it can't verify. If the collector then reinserts the item, that's a separate problem worth raising, and what collectors can and can't do covers where the line sits.

Two things to think about in the final year before an item ages off. First, don't make a token payment just to tidy the account up, because in many states that can revive a debt that had become too old to sue over. Second, if a collector contacts you during that window, a written request that they validate the debt is usually a better first move than a payment, and how to answer a collection letter covers what to say and what not to.

Where Felix fits

Felix negotiates with creditors and collectors over the balance itself. That's a different job from credit repair, and worth being clear about: we don't remove accurate information from anyone's credit report, and nobody legitimately can.

What we do is look at each account, work out who owns it now and what the paperwork actually supports, and bring you offers to accept or turn down. Every letter that goes out is one you've read and signed yourself, mailed in your own name. Whether the resulting entry reads as settled or paid, and when it ages off, still follows the rules above.

Checking what you'd qualify for is free and runs on a soft credit pull, so looking costs you nothing on your score. The FAQ covers credit impact and how your information is handled, and pricing is listed in full.