How Long Do Late Payments Stay In My Credit Report?
Late credit card and loan payments can remain up to seven years on your credit report. What makes the answer a little less precise is that every lender is allowed to decide what they consider to be a late payment and the point when they report it as late to one of the credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion).
For the majority of cases, when you are more than 30 days past due on your payment the lender or creditor will notify major credit bureaus. At this point, your late payment would appear on your personal credit reports. A delinquency like this would usually drop off of the credit reports after seven years from the first date of delinquency.
Consider an example. If you experienced a 30 day late payment that the creditor reported in June of 2018 and you made the account current by July of 2018, then the late payment notification would fall of your credit reports in June of 2025. If you were late on two consecutive payments, the 60 day late payment notice from June of 2018 that you caught up on in August of 2018 would still disappear from your report in June of 2025.
Late payments will have their greatest effect on your credit score when they are first reported. The good news is that with the aging late payment notice, the effect on your credit score should be less. Each of the three credit bureaus maintains its own rules for evaluating your credit history information and so generating your credit score.
Late payments can cause a larger impact on one credit score than another because of this. It explains why there is variance between the credit scores generated by the different three major bureaus.
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