What is a late payment?
A late payment is a delinquency of 30 days or more on any account (installment or revolving), reported by the creditor to the credit bureaus.
How long does a late payment stay on your credit report?
A late payments can be reported for 7 years after the date of the delinquency.
How does a late payment impact your credit report?
A single 30-day late payment can lower the FICO score up to 60 points. Recent late payments are more damaging to FICO score than late payments which occurred a long time ago. Other criteria to consider is how frequently late payments occur, the more frequent, the worse. And obviously a 90 day late payment is more damaging to the FICO score than a 30-day late payment.
What happens after a significant amount of late payments?
In the event the account is more than 180-days late, the creditor may charge off the account, report it to credit reporting agencies (CRA) as a charge off/ profit and loss write-off, and send it to a collection agency.
How does a late payment impact my other accounts?
It is important to know that depending on type of account delinquency it may have several different consequences. For example if you made a late payment on a credit card, you most likely lost the opportunity to get approved for a credit limit increase. If you made a 30 day late payment on a mortgage account your chances for a refinance and getting a better interest rate for the next 12 months are equal to 0.
Bottom Line
Being late on any bill for any length of time negatively affects your FICO credit score.
Credit Firm has helped thousands of clients delete accounts with late payments from credit reports and repair derogatory accounts by removing late payments from the accounts. If you have a late payment reporting on your credit report, contact Credit Firm to fix your credit report and raise your credit score.