How Far Back a Tenant Screening Report Can Look: The FCRA Reporting Limits Explained

Why the Lookback Window Matters

A tenant screening report is a consumer report, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act limits how far back most of the negative information on it can reach. Those limits are set in Section 605 of the FCRA, codified at 15 U.S.C. 1681c, and they matter to a landlord for two reasons. First, they define what a compliant screening company is allowed to show you, so a report that surfaces a decade-old collection or a fifteen-year-old civil judgment may be reporting something it should not. Second, if you make a decision on stale information that the law says should have dropped off, you inherit part of the exposure even though you did not compile the report.

The rules are easiest to hold onto as a set of separate clocks rather than a single number. Most adverse items run seven years. Bankruptcies run ten. Criminal convictions have no federal time limit at all. And a layer of state law sits on top of the federal floor, frequently shortening what a report may show and, in a growing number of states, restricting how criminal records in particular can be used. Knowing which clock applies to which item is what keeps a screening decision defensible.

None of this changes the separate obligation to base a decision on accurate, current information and to send an adverse action notice when a report contributes to a denial. The lookback limits govern what can appear on the report; the adverse action rules govern what you do after you read it. This article covers the first question and treats the second only where the two intersect.

The Seven-Year Rule and What It Covers

The core of Section 605 is a seven-year limit on most adverse information. Under 15 U.S.C. 1681c(a), a consumer reporting agency generally may not report accounts placed for collection or charged to profit and loss, civil suits and civil judgments, records of arrest, paid tax liens, or any other adverse item of information that predates the report by more than seven years. The clock generally runs from the date of the underlying event, and for collection accounts the FCRA ties the start to the date the account first became delinquent.

For a landlord reading a screening report, the practical effect is that a report should be showing a recent pattern rather than an applicant's entire financial life. A collection that first went delinquent eight years ago, a small-claims judgment from nine years back, or an arrest that never led to a conviction and is more than seven years old should generally not be on the report at all. If items like that appear, that is a signal the report may not be from an FCRA-compliant source, which is a problem worth taking seriously before you rely on anything else in it.

The seven-year window is a reporting limit, not a statement about whether the underlying event ever happened. An old debt does not disappear because it fell off a report, and a landlord who learns of something through a different lawful channel is in a different situation than one who read it on a stale consumer report. The point of the rule is narrower: it defines what a screening company may put in front of you.

Bankruptcies Run Ten Years

Bankruptcy is the main exception to the seven-year rule and runs longer. Under Section 605, a bankruptcy case under Title 11 of the U.S. Code may be reported for up to ten years, measured from the date of entry of the order for relief or the date of adjudication. That covers both Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 filings, although in practice the credit bureaus have historically removed completed Chapter 13 cases somewhat sooner as a matter of policy rather than because the FCRA requires it.

For screening, a bankruptcy on a report is a data point, not an automatic disqualifier, and treating it as one can create fair housing exposure if the effect falls unevenly. What matters is reading it in context: a discharge several years old followed by a clean rental and payment record tells a different story than a very recent filing, and the individualized read is both the fairer approach and the more defensible one.

Convictions, Arrests, and the Gap Between Them

Criminal history splits into two categories that the FCRA treats very differently. Records of arrest that did not lead to a conviction are adverse items subject to the seven-year limit, so an old arrest with no conviction should generally age off the report. Records of criminal convictions, by contrast, were removed from the obsolescence limits by a 1998 amendment, and under federal law a conviction can be reported with no time restriction at all.

That gap reflects a fairness principle rather than an oversight: an arrest on its own is not proof of wrongdoing, while a conviction is an adjudicated result. But the fact that federal law permits a conviction to be reported indefinitely does not mean it is safe to use one indefinitely. Several states cap how far back criminal records can be reported or used in housing, some restrict the use of conviction records that did not result in a housing-related risk, and fair housing principles push strongly toward an individualized assessment rather than a flat bar. Federal reporting limits are the floor here, not the whole rule.

The High-Dollar Exceptions and Why They Rarely Reach Rentals

Section 605 contains a set of exceptions in subsection (b) that switch off the seven-year limits entirely, and they occasionally cause confusion when they surface in a screening discussion. The exceptions apply when a consumer report is used in connection with a credit transaction with a principal amount of 150,000 dollars or more, the underwriting of life insurance with a face amount of 150,000 dollars or more, or the employment of an individual at an annual salary of 75,000 dollars or more. In those narrow situations the older adverse items can be reported.

The important point for a landlord is that residential tenant screening is not on that list. A standard rental application does not become a 150,000-dollar credit transaction because the annual rent adds up to a large number over a multi-year lease, and the employment exception is about screening someone for a job, not about an applicant's income. As a practical matter, a routine tenant screening report is governed by the ordinary seven-year and ten-year limits, and a report that reaches back further on the theory that one of these exceptions applies deserves scrutiny.

Because the framing of these exceptions is easy to misstate, it is worth being precise: they are exceptions to a reporting prohibition, they are keyed to specific dollar thresholds and specific uses, and none of the enumerated uses is residential leasing. If a vendor or a report suggests otherwise, that is a reason to ask questions rather than to accept the older data.

State Law Often Looks Back Less Far

The FCRA sets a national ceiling, but a number of states have enacted their own reporting limits that are shorter or that restrict particular categories of information, and where a state rule is more protective it controls. Several states, for example, reimpose a seven-year cap on criminal conviction reporting for most purposes despite the federal rule allowing convictions indefinitely, and some restrict or prohibit the use of certain records, such as eviction filings that did not result in a judgment or older non-conviction records, in a housing decision.

This is the part of the analysis that a national template cannot answer, because the variation is real and it changes what you may lawfully consider, not merely what a report happens to show. A landlord operating in a single state should know that state's reporting and use limits for credit, eviction, and criminal history. A landlord operating across state lines cannot assume the federal floor is the operative rule in every market, because in several of them it is not.

The trend over the last few years has been toward tighter state and local restrictions on the use of criminal and eviction records in housing specifically, separate from the FCRA's reporting limits. Those use restrictions are a distinct body of law from the reporting windows discussed here, and they can bar a landlord from acting on information that a report is technically allowed to display. When the two point in different directions, the more restrictive rule is the one to follow.

When Obsolete Information Appears Anyway

Reporting limits are rules, not guarantees, and outdated items do sometimes appear on reports, most often because a furnisher reported an inaccurate delinquency date or because a public record was matched to the wrong file. When that happens, the applicant has the right to dispute the item with the screening company, which must generally reinvestigate, usually within thirty days, and correct or delete information it cannot verify. That process belongs to the applicant and the reporting agency; the landlord is a user of the report, not the agency that compiled it.

The landlord's role when an applicant flags a stale or inaccurate item is limited but real. The right response is not to litigate the accuracy of the record yourself, but to avoid finalizing an adverse decision on a contested item while the dispute is open where you reasonably can, to point the applicant to the screening company's dispute channel, and to make sure your adverse action notice correctly identifies the agency that supplied the report so the applicant can exercise their rights. Acting on information you have specific reason to believe is obsolete is exactly the situation the reporting limits are meant to prevent.

For a landlord, the cleanest protection is to use an FCRA-compliant screening source that applies these limits at the point of reporting, to read what comes back with the seven-year, ten-year, and no-limit clocks in mind, and to check the applicable state rules before acting on anything at the older end of the range. This is general information rather than legal advice, and because both the reporting limits and the use restrictions vary by state, a screening policy meant to run in more than one state should be reviewed against each state's law and, where criminal or eviction history is involved, with counsel.