Hi trish, and welcome.
Your confusion is understandable, because you read a lot of posts that talk about "account falloff" at certain dates, which is incorrect, and that leads to confusion.
"Accounts" dont fall from your credit report under any provision of the FCRA. What falls from inclusion in your credit report are individual derogs and delinquencies reported on an account after certain time frames have passed (all set forth in FCRA 605(a), if you want to read the details).
There are there common types of delinquencies and derogs that result from an account with an original credit (OC).
First, there are monthly delinquencies that occur while the OC account is open. They can be multiple, ranging from 30 to 180+ days late. For each of these reported monthly delinquencies, simply take the date that the delinquency occured, and add 7 years to that date. After expiration of a 7 year period for each delinquency, that individual delinquency can no longer appear in your credit report (CR). So if you have multiple monthly delinquencies, each has its own individual CR deletion date. There is no one date for these critters.
The two remaning types of derogs that arise from an OC account are charge-offs done by the OC, and collections reported by a debt collector. These are paired up because they both have the exact, identicial date for CR deletion, which is based on a date called the DOFD. The DOFD is the date of first delinquency on the OC account in the most recent chain of delinquencies that occured prior to the charge-off or collection being reported. Stated differently, if you had prior account delinquencies, and then brought the account back into good-standing, then a new DOFD would be reset beginning with your first delinquency in any new chains of delinquency. Obviously, you last chain of delinquencies prior to the OC doing a charge-off or referring the bad debt to collection fixes your final DOFD for calculation of when any charge-off or collection must be removed from your CR.
The DOFD is a date-certain fixed by statute (FCRA 623(a)(5) and FCRA 605(c), if you want to see the statutory language). Without getting into confusing statutory language, what it means is that NO date filed, status date, date reported, date of last activity, date of payments, date of the charge-off, date of the collection, etc., is material when determining the date of CR fall-off of a collection or charge-off. Period. The CR deletion date (FCRA 605(c)) is caste in granite for collections and charge-offs as 7 years plus 180-days from the DOFD on the OC account.
As for civil judgments, you usually have only one date to consider. That date is 7 years from the date of entry of the judgment, whether paid or not. FCRA 605(a)(2).
Lots of different dates that apply to different types of derogs and delinquencies. There really is no "one date."
