How to remove late payments from your credit report

Late payments can be an annoying reminder of poor credit history. More than this, they can have a large impact on your credit score. In some cases you can remove late payments from your credit reports. In other cases the best course of action is to wait for the late payment to expire, making sure to stay on top of payments from now on.

Late payments appear on a credit report as a derogatory, or negative mark. While a single late payment is not going to have a huge impact on your credit score, a history of late payments will most certainly take their toll.

Payment history is the biggest factor credit bureaus use when creating your credit score. A history of late payments, missed payments, or partial payments will reflect poorly on your overall score.

The best way to solve late payments moving forward is to simply pay on time and work towards repairing your credit score. However, you can dispute late payments if you think there's a chance it may be inaccurate or unverifiable.

It is important to regularly review your credit reports from each bureau. It does no harm to your report, and helps you catch issues early on. Late payment remarks are most common on lines of credit, so that may be a good place to start. In this case you are only looking for late payments, but a thorough search may bring up other errors you should be aware of as well, such as incorrect charged off accounts.

With your own personal records at hand, compare your credit reports and look for any inconsistencies.

There are two things you are looking for when going through your reports: incorrect remarks, and old payments.

A late payment remark will last for 7 years at most. After this, the remark is expired, and cannot be counted against your report. Sometimes creditors or bureaus forget to remove these remarks. If you find expired remarks older than 7 years, take note.

An incorrect remark occurs when you make a payment on time, but it still gets marked as late. These are often human mistakes, but are important to catch, as mistakes such as these may leave a dent in your credit score.

Compare the remarks to your personal records. If you notice any inconsistencies between your personal records and your credit report, take note of them. Having these records on hand will help you file a dispute.

If you have found any accidental late payments, double charges, or expired payments, you can file a dispute with the credit bureau. The bureau typically has 30 days to resolve any disputes you file. Take note, however, that you will have to file a separate dispute for each bureau the creditor reports to.

You can also file a dispute with the creditor themselves. They will have 30 days to respond to the dispute. If they find the payment is incorrect, they must notify all credit bureaus they report to and have the incorrect information removed.

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), any information appearing on your credit report must be 100% accurate and verifiable, otherwise it must be corrected or removed. Consumers may file a dispute if they suspect that a late payment remark may indeed be inaccurate or unverifiable. It never hurts to try.

There is no guaranteed way to remove a legitimate late payment from your credit report once it is filed, but the first step towards getting the information corrected or removed is to dispute it directly with the creditor or credit bureau.

If your late payment is appearing on an account that has been charged off and sold to a collection agency, then some debt collectors will offer people what is called a "pay for delete" offer. This essentially means that if the person pays off a collection account, the debt collector or creditor agrees to instruct the bureaus to remove the account from their credit report.

If they agree to delete the paid collection account from your credit report after you pay it, it will not do anything about the original late payments on the original charged off account. These original account and late payment would need to be disputed separately, but having the collection removed will still provide a boost to your credit score.

If you don't want to dispute your late payment, then sending a goodwill letter to the creditor is another option. Many people have had success with writing these letters and your success may vary. This is essentially a letter explaining the reason behind the late payment, in the hopes that they will be kind enough to remove the late payment for you as a favor.

However, given that credit reporting agencies must report accurate information, there is still no guarantee that the creditor will remove the late payment. If it is a one-time late payment and you catch it early enough, there may be a chance to solve the issue with the creditor before it ever gets reported to the credit bureau.

Always send a goodwill letter, because there is no downside. Optionally you can still choose to dispute the late payment later on.

A single late payment will not make or break your credit. However, a history of late payments may harm your score.

Removing late payments from your credit report is simple enough if there was a mistake, the creditor agrees to delete it as a favor, the late payment remark has expired, or it is proven to be inaccurate or unverifiable. A legitimate late payment will likely stay on your report for 7 year. The best course of action in these cases is to take steps towards improving your credit now, and waiting for the late payment to disappear with time.