When does a credit card charge off? The 180-day rule

The short answer. A credit card charges off after 180 days past due — about six consecutive missed minimum payments. That timing is not the issuer’s discretion: under a uniform federal banking rule, a bank must classify a revolving account such as a credit card as a loss and charge it off once it reaches 180 days past due. A charge-off is an accounting event for the lender, not a cancellation of the debt — you still owe the money, and a separate seven-year credit-reporting clock now starts to run. This guide walks the full path from the first missed payment to charge-off, stage by stage, so you can see exactly where an account sits and what each milestone triggers.

The road to charge-off, month by month

Charge-off is the end of a six-month decline, not a single surprise event. Understanding the stages matters because the consequences escalate at each one, and several of them are reversible right up until the end.

The first window is the quietest. A payment that is 1 to 29 days late usually draws a late fee, but most issuers do not report it to the credit bureaus yet. Credit reporting runs on a monthly cycle, and a missed payment generally becomes a reported delinquency only once it is a full 30 days past due. That 30-day mark is the first derogatory entry on your credit report, and because payment history is the single largest factor in a credit score, it is also the most damaging early step.

Once the account passes 60 days past due, a second consequence becomes available to the issuer. Under the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (the CARD Act), implemented through the Federal Reserve’s Regulation Z at 12 C.F.R. 1026.55, an issuer may raise the interest rate on your existing balance — a penalty annual percentage rate (APR) — only after the account is more than 60 days delinquent, and only after sending advance notice. There is a built-in off-ramp: if you then make the next six minimum payments on time, the issuer must roll that rate increase back off the existing balance.

From 90 days onward the delinquency is re-reported at each successive 30-day stage — 90, 120, then 150 days late — each one a fresh negative mark, while collection contact from the issuer grows more frequent and more urgent. Then, at 180 days past due, the account charges off.

Why 180 days — the FFIEC rule

The reason charge-off lands almost universally at the 180-day mark is a single supervisory policy that every federally regulated bank follows. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) — the joint body of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Reserve, and other federal banking regulators — issued the Uniform Retail Credit Classification and Account Management Policy, revised in 1999 and clarified in June 2000, with full implementation required by the end of 2000.

The policy is precise about timing. It requires that open-end credit — revolving accounts such as credit cards — be classified as a loss and charged off when it becomes 180 days past due, while closed-end credit — installment loans like an auto loan or a personal loan — is charged off at 120 days (extended to 180 days for loans secured by one-to-four-family residential real estate). The policy is a banking-supervision rule rather than a consumer-protection statute, which is why it governs the lender’s books rather than granting you a right. It also leaves room for examiner judgment: a bank can be required to charge off an account earlier if it shows other signs of weakness. But for an ordinary delinquent credit card, 180 days is the general outer limit, which is why nearly every card charges off at the same point.

What charge-off actually does — and what it does not

The word “charge-off” sounds terminal, and it is widely misread as meaning the debt has been written off in the sense of forgiven. It has not been. A charge-off is the creditor’s internal accounting decision to move the debt from an asset it expects to collect to a loss it has recognized for tax and financial-reporting purposes. The legal obligation to repay is untouched.

What changes is who pursues you and how. After charge-off, the original creditor typically does one of three things: keeps trying to collect in-house, hands the account to a collection agency, or sells it to a debt buyer for a few cents on the dollar — after which the debt buyer attempts to collect the full balance. The account is reported to the bureaus with a “charged off” status, one of the most serious negative marks a revolving account can carry.

Charge-off also starts the clock that determines how long the damage lasts, and that clock is the most misunderstood part of the whole process. The seven-year credit-reporting limit does not run from the charge-off date; it runs from the original date of first delinquency — the missed payment that began this six-month chain. Finding and verifying that date is its own task, covered in our guide on how to find the date of first delinquency, and the full seven-years-plus-180-days math, along with the separate state statute of limitations on being sued, lives in our explainer on the charge-off statute of limitations. Paying the debt later does not erase the charge-off; it changes the status to “paid charge-off,” which still reports for the remainder of the seven years.

How to stop the slide before 180 days

Because charge-off is the end of a long progression, almost every stage before it offers a way out. The single most effective move is also the simplest: bring the account current with a full payment, which halts the march toward the next 30-day delinquency mark. If a full payment is not possible, contacting the issuer before charge-off is far more productive than people expect — most large issuers run hardship or forbearance programs that can lower the minimum payment, pause interest, or re-age the account back to current after a few on-time payments. Acting at 60 or 90 days, when the issuer still owns the account and wants to avoid a loss, gives you leverage that disappears once the debt is charged off and sold.

If charge-off has already happened, the playbook shifts from prevention to cleanup: verify the debt with any collector that contacts you, confirm your date of first delinquency so you know exactly when the item must fall off, and weigh the pay-versus-let-it-age decision. The routes to removing or resolving a charge-off — disputing a genuine error, a goodwill request, or a pay-for-delete negotiation — are laid out in our guide on how to remove a charge-off.

What to verify

• Your account’s exact delinquency stage — pull your reports at annualcreditreport.com to see how many 30-day increments have been reported and whether a charge-off has posted.
• The FFIEC policy — occ.treas.gov (OCC Bulletin 2000-20) for the 180-day open-end and 120-day closed-end charge-off thresholds.
• The penalty-APR rule — consumerfinance.gov for the CARD Act / Regulation Z 1026.55 limits on raising the rate on an existing balance.
• Your issuer’s hardship options — call the number on the back of the card before 180 days; programs are real but rarely advertised.

The 180-day rule is fixed and uniform across regulated banks, but the months leading up to it are the part you can still change. The earlier you act in the timeline, the more options you have.