Statute of limitations on debt, and the mistake that restarts it

A collector calls about a credit card you stopped paying in 2013. You offer $50 as a good faith gesture. In many states you have just given them a fresh multi-year window to take you to court over the full balance.

That is not a trick question. It is the most common and most costly misunderstanding about old debt, and it comes from mixing up two clocks that have nothing to do with each other.

The two clocks

Clock one: the statute of limitations. This is the deadline for a creditor to file a lawsuit against you. It is set by state law, it varies by the type of debt, and it commonly runs somewhere between three and six years, with some states longer. When it expires the debt is called time-barred.

Clock two: credit reporting. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, most negative information comes off your report seven years after the date of first delinquency. Chapter 7 bankruptcy runs ten years. This clock is federal and the same everywhere.

They start at different moments, run for different lengths, and expiring one does nothing to the other.

What time-barred actually means

It does not mean the debt vanished. It means the collector loses the courtroom.

They can still call you. They can still send letters. They can still report it, if the seven year window has not closed. What they cannot do is sue you, and under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act they cannot threaten to sue either. A collector who says “we will take you to court” over a debt they know is time-barred has broken federal law, and that gives you a claim against them.

Since late 2021, federal debt collection rules also require collectors to disclose in certain communications when a debt is too old to be sued on. If you get a notice with language about how the age of the debt means they will not sue you, that is what you are reading, and it is a strong signal about where you stand.

The restart problem

Here is the part that costs people real money.

In many states, certain actions revive an expired statute of limitations, or restart a running one at zero:

• Making a payment of any size, including a small “good faith” payment
• Agreeing in writing that the debt is yours
• Sometimes, agreeing verbally on a recorded line
• Entering a payment plan

Which of these resets the clock depends entirely on your state. Some states allow revival of an already-expired debt. Others only allow a running clock to restart. The differences are significant and they are the reason a general article cannot tell you what will happen in your case.

This is also why collectors buy very old debt cheaply and call about it. The portfolio is nearly worthless as a lawsuit. It becomes valuable the moment someone sends $25.

What to do when an old debt surfaces

Do not confirm anything on the phone

Not that the debt is yours, not the amount, not your date of birth. Ask them to send everything in writing. That request costs you nothing and gives up nothing.

Send a written validation request

If this is the first contact from this collector, you have 30 days to demand validation in writing under the FDCPA. They must stop collection activity until they produce it. Old debts have often been sold several times, and the buyer frequently cannot produce documentation that survives scrutiny.

Work out the date of first delinquency

This is the anchor for both clocks. It is the date you first fell behind and never brought the account current again. Not the date the collector bought it. Not the date of last contact.

Your credit report should list it. If a collector is reporting a later date than the truth, that alone is a dispute worth filing, and our dispute walkthrough covers how.

Find your state’s rule before you do anything else

Check the type of debt as well as the state. Written contracts, open accounts and promissory notes often carry different periods within the same state.

Your state attorney general’s consumer protection pages are a reasonable starting point. A consumer law attorney in your state will usually tell you in a free consultation, and they will know the case law, which a statute lookup will not give you.

If you are sued, show up

This is not optional and it is where most people lose.

An expired statute of limitations is an affirmative defense. It protects you only if you appear and raise it. Debt buyers file large volumes of suits on old debt precisely because most defendants never respond. The court then enters a default judgment, and a default judgment can be enforced through wage garnishment and bank levies for years, regardless of how old the original debt was.

Answering the summons is what makes the age of the debt matter. Legal aid organizations in most areas help with exactly this.

Should you pay an old debt at all?

There is a real case for paying, and a real case for not.

Paying can make sense if the debt is still inside the seven year reporting window and payment would remove or improve the entry, or if you simply want it settled and the amount is small enough that the risk is acceptable.

Not paying can make sense if the debt is past both clocks, since a payment could revive a lawsuit risk that had already expired, in exchange for nothing your credit report will notice.

Whichever way you go, get any settlement in writing before you send a dollar, and make sure the agreement states what the collector will report afterward.

About the state by state table

We are not publishing one yet. A 50 state table of limitation periods by debt type is genuinely useful, and it is also the kind of page that does real harm if a single row is out of date. Ours goes up after a consumer law attorney reviews it.

Until then, treat any table you find elsewhere as a starting point for a conversation, not as the answer.

Last verified

July 2, 2026. General principles only. Statutes of limitation are state law and change through legislation and court decisions.