Collections and the seven-year reporting rule
Negative items don't live on your report forever. The seven-year clock has specific start dates worth knowing.
The FCRA, at 15 U.S.C. §1605(a), caps how long most negative items can stay on your credit report at seven years. After that window, the item must be removed regardless of whether it was paid or settled. The trick is knowing exactly when the seven-year clock starts.
For a collection or charge-off, the clock starts on the 'date of first delinquency' — the date you first fell behind with the original creditor and never caught up. It does NOT restart when the debt is sold to another collector. A debt buyer cannot legally re-age the account by listing today's date as the start of the clock.
Re-aging is one of the most common violations on credit reports. A collector buys an old debt, posts it to your file with a recent 'date opened,' and quietly resets the seven-year timer. Disputing this is straightforward: pull your old reports, find the original date of first delinquency, and demand correction or deletion.
Bankruptcies follow different rules. Chapter 7 stays on your report for ten years from the filing date; Chapter 13 stays for seven years from filing. Tax liens, civil judgments, and most public records have been removed entirely from credit reports since 2017 thanks to the National Consumer Assistance Plan.
Paid collections are a special case under the newer scoring models. FICO 9 and VantageScore 3.0+ ignore paid collections entirely. Older FICO models — still used by many lenders — count them, which is why it's often worth disputing paid collections instead of just paying them and assuming the score will recover.