Date of First Delinquency (DOFD)

Why it matters

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, most negative information must stop being reported about seven years after the DOFD — not from when the debt was sold, charged off, or handed to a collector. This matters because a single unpaid debt can pass through the original creditor, a collection agency, and one or more debt buyers, but the seven-year clock still runs from that original first-missed-payment date. Later handlers of the debt are not supposed to reset the DOFD. Doing so to keep an old item on the report longer is a form of illegal re-aging. Checking the reported DOFD against your own records is how many people catch items that have overstayed the legal reporting window.

Example

Leah misses a credit card payment in March 2020 and never catches up, so her DOFD is set in 2020. The card is charged off, then sold to a debt buyer in 2022. Even though the debt buyer began reporting in 2022, the account should still fall off Leah's credit report about seven years after the 2020 DOFD, not seven years after 2022. If a report shows a first-delinquency date later than 2020, Leah can dispute it.