How to Remove Late Payments from Your Credit Report
10 Min Read | Last updated: July 3, 2025
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Incorrect late payments could affect your credit reports for years. Learn how to remove late payments from your credit report to help benefit your credit.
At-A-Glance
- Payment history is the most important factor when determining your credit score, so just one late or missed payment could greatly impact your credit.
- Legitimate payments that are 30 or more days late may stay on your credit report for seven years, but filing a dispute could remove illegitimate late payments.
- One late payment may not ruin a strong credit score forever, especially if you continue making on-time payments and practice responsible borrowing behaviors.
Anyone can forget a due date or simply miss a credit card payment, no matter how financially responsible they are. However, even just one late payment could negatively impact your credit score.1 This may impact your chances of getting approved for credit in the future. But what if you’ve discovered an incorrect or unfamiliar late payment on your credit report?
Keep reading to understand what you can do about inaccurate late payments.
What Is a Credit Report?
Your credit report is an essential document that outlines your history with credit cards, loans, leases, and any other credit accounts you’ve opened, creating a detailed financial picture. You have three credit reports, one for each major credit bureau, and each report contains a version of your credit score. Lenders, and in certain cases, debt collection agencies, insurance companies, and even potential employers can review your credit report in some circumstances as well.2
Can You Delete Late Payments From Credit Reports?
Lenders and credit bureaus are required to delete outdated, incorrect, or unverifiable information on your credit report if you point it out to them.3 This means you cannot get legitimate late payments removed from credit reports. However, you can wait it out, as late payments may fall off your credit report after seven years and may have less impact as time passes.4
Steps to Remove Incorrect Late Payments from Your Credit Report
Let’s say you notice a dip in your credit score that doesn’t make sense. Getting copies of your credit reports could help you figure out what’s going on. Scan the reports for errors regarding personal information, payment dates, and account statuses, and if something looks inaccurate, a dispute could lead to correction, clarification, or removal.
To get an incorrect late payment removed from your credit report, you can:
- File a Dispute with the Bureau: You can dispute with all three bureaus to challenge incorrect personal, billing, credit account, and other inaccurate financial information on your credit report, usually by describing each issue and providing any proof that you have.5
- Request Verification from Your Debt Collector: In applicable cases, you can request verification of a debt, especially if you haven’t received a validation notice that details the amount owed, the name of the original creditor, and your right to dispute the debt within 30 days.6
- Re-Dispute: If the bureau doesn’t resolve the dispute in your favor, you can send another dispute if you have additional relevant documentation to help remove negative items from your report.
- Consider a Consumer Statement: If you can’t get the bureau to remove something, you may be able to add a consumer statement to your report explaining why you believe something is being reported incorrectly.7
- Formally complain with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB): You can submit your issue to the CFPB. They’ll contact the company you’re disputing with, and hopefully, you’ll receive an answer 15 to 60 days following the complaint.8
How Late Payments Impact Your Credit Score
Most credit scoring models consider your payment history as one of the most significant factors when determining your score, and a late payment could negatively impact your credit. How much of an impact it will have will vary, depending on different factors including how long the payment has been due.9 And unfortunately, the better your score is, the more damage a missed payment might do.10
Late payments might also lead to:
- Late fees:
Late payments can result in late fees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently finalized a rule limiting late payment fees to just $8 per incident.11 - Penalty APRs:
After 60 days without payment, credit card issuers may charge penalty APRs.12 Be on the lookout for any notices. Your credit card account will typically need to be at least a year old, and you must receive a rate increase notification at least 45 days in advance.13
How You Can Reduce the Impact of Late Payments on Your Credit Report
The later the payment, the riskier a credit report looks to a lender, so the sooner you settle your debts, the better. Lenders often categorize delinquencies by how many days late they’ve become: 30, 60, 90, 120, 150, and eventually “charged off”, which means the lender has written off the loss due to severe delinquency.14
Paying your credit card early could help stabilize your credit score after being impacted by late payments. You could also opt for automatic payments to help avoid late payments altogether. As long as you have a linked payment account with funds, autopayments could help you have one less thing to worry about.
Can Credit Repair Companies Remove Late Payments?
Credit repair companies can’t do anything that you can’t do yourself, and some credit repair companies use misleading tactics to scam people.15 Still, there may be legitimate organizations that could be able to help you manage your credit.
If you wind up hiring a credit repair organization, be on the lookout for potential red flags:
- Demanding payment upfront.
- Holding back information.
- Suggesting you lie to credit bureaus or misrepresent information.
- Not answering your questions.
How to Improve Your Credit Score
While on-time payments are a large factor in your credit score health, there are other factors you can focus on to bounce back.
- Avoid multiple hard inquiries in a short period.
Hard credit checks almost always happen when you apply for a new credit line, typically dinging your credit score for a short time. However, applying for too many credit lines in a short timeframe could negatively impact your credit. - Get and keep your balances low.
Credit utilization, or how much of your available credit is in use, is another factor in calculating your credit score. Lower balances mean a lower credit utilization ratio, which could benefit your credit score. - Befriend a realistic budget.
Spending outside of your means could have major negative credit consequences. Creating a monthly budget could help you understand and respect your financial limits, and knowing where your money goes might also help you avoid late payments and high utilization in the future. - Make regular credit report check-ins a habit.
Knowing what your credit report contains is important for keeping track of your hard inquiries, spotting inaccuracies, and detecting potentially fraudulent activity. After all, you can’t dispute a mistake on your credit report if you’ve never seen it. Reviewing your report as it strengthens over time could also be motivational for solidifying responsible borrowing habits.
Frequently Asked Questions
While a lender is not required to respond to a letter requesting the removal of a legitimate late payment, you should keep your tone and language formal.16 Accountability, transparency, and supporting documentation could all positively contribute to your appeal.
A 609 letter is a request you send to verify any inaccurate-looking accounts on your credit report.17 However, a 609 letter is a request for existing information already present in your report, not an official dispute.
A pay-for-delete letter is a request you send to collections or a creditor to ask that they remove a negative credit report item if you pay them.18 While you typically write pay-for-delete letters when you have a legitimate unpaid debt, this approach doesn’t guarantee success and may have limitations as well.19
The Takeaway
There are ways to remove incorrect late payments from your credit report to help maintain your credit health. But if a payment is legitimately late, there is no legal obligation to remove it. The good news is that missing a payment or two is unlikely to negatively impact your credit score forever, especially if you have a long history of on-time payments and practice responsible borrowing habits.
1,2,4,9,10,18 “Can You Remove Late Payments from Your Credit Reports?,” Equifax
3 “Can you remove collections from your credit report without paying?,” CBS
5,7 “A Guide to Credit Report Disputes,” Equifax
6 “Can you dispute a debt that was sold to a debt collector?,” CBS
8 “How to file a complaint with the CFPB: A step-by-step guide,” Bankrate
11 “Credit card late fees cost Americans billions a year — now they’re capped at $8,” CNBC
12 “What Happens When You Don't Pay Your Credit Card Bill by the Due Date?,” myFICO
13 “Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009,” Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute
14 “How FICO® Considers Different Categories of Late Payments,” myFICO
15 “How to Spot and Avoid Credit Repair Scams,” Experian
16 “Can a goodwill letter get late payments removed from your credit report?,” Bankrate
17 “What is a 609 dispute letter?,” Bankrate
18,19 “What is a pay-for-delete letter?,” Bankrate
Derek Moran is a freelance writer and researcher whose work focuses on digital marketing and financial services.
All Credit Intel content is written by freelance authors and commissioned and paid for by American Express.
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