Credit Reporting of Closed Account

[Anonymous]

If I closed a card that had a balance on it, does it fall off 10 years from closure or 10 years from paid off. Let say I close it today and pay off the balance by June next year. I don't carry balances but wondering when it would fall off.

[takeshi74]

No idea on the reporting falloff but closing a card with a balance is a bad idea as it can report with maxed out utilization.

[RobertEG]

Deletion of closed accounts is purely an administratve decision by the CRAs to purge their databases of old info that they consider to be of minimal practical ause, and is not controlled by statute or regulation.

Their general policy is approx ten years aftter account closure.

However, some have experienced deletion after approx seven years, while others have seen no deletion after periods of over 15 years.

It is not tightly controlled or uniformly applied.

[vanillabean]

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@MstrPTato wrote:

If I closed a card that had a balance on it ...

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But why would you?

[RobertEG]

There are legimate reasons to close accts.

Perhaps the card has an annual fee, perhaps the consumer had prior authorizations to make recurring automatic renewals charged to the account that they wished to eliminate, perhaps they want to reduce potential identity theft, or perhaps they wish to simply reduce the numbeer of accts they must monitor monthly.

Closing the card to further use might be beneficial............

Many have, for example,  ignored monthly monitoring of open cards that they assumed had a zero balance only to see a balance pop up with an associated 30-late.