Do medical bills affect your credit score?

What the bureaus took off, and when

The biggest change did not come from Congress or a regulator. It came from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion themselves, in two steps:

• From July 1, 2022: paid medical collections are removed from credit reports, and an unpaid medical collection cannot appear until it is a year old (the wait used to be six months).
• From April 11, 2023: medical collections with an initial balance under $500 are removed. The bureaus said this took out about 70% of the medical collection accounts on reports.

Two things follow. First, the medical debt that can still reach your report is narrow: a collection that is unpaid, at least a year old and $500 or more to begin with. Second, all of this is bureau policy, not law. The bureaus chose it and could in principle change it, and that matters for everything below, because the attempts to turn it into law have mostly failed.

What can still hurt you

A large, old, unpaid medical collection still counts as a collection, and the FTC lists collections among the items likely to hurt a score. On FICO Score 8, which myFICO calls the version most widely used by lenders, it is treated like any other collection. An accurate negative item can stay on a report for up to seven years.

The other route onto your report has nothing to do with medical rules at all. Pay a hospital bill with a credit card and it stops being medical debt: it is a card balance, counted under amounts owed (30% of a FICO Score) like a balance from anything else. None of the bureau carve-outs apply to it. The same goes for a personal loan taken out to cover treatment. Putting a large medical bill on a card to "get it off your plate" swaps a debt the bureaus treat gently for one they do not.

The one-year wait before an unpaid medical collection can appear is room to sort out insurance and billing, not a pardon. Once it passes, a collection of $500 or more is reportable like any other.

The federal ban that never took effect

On January 7, 2025, the CFPB finalized a rule banning medical debt from credit reports. It was due to take effect on March 15, 2025, and was then delayed. It never applied to anyone.

On July 11, 2025, Judge Sean Jordan of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas vacated the rule in Cornerstone Credit Union League v. CFPB. He did it on a consent judgment that the CFPB itself had asked for, holding that the rule went beyond the bureau's authority under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. As of October 2026 there is no federal ban on medical debt in credit reports. What protects most people is still the bureaus' own 2022 and 2023 policies.

State protections need a separate check

State medical-debt protections and their interaction with federal credit-reporting law can depend on the jurisdiction, the debt and current court decisions. Do not infer that a nationwide bureau policy describes every protection available in your state, or that a state restriction automatically deletes an entry.

For a particular report, first check whether the collection is paid, whether its initial balance was under $500 and whether the waiting period has passed. Those are the nationwide bureau-policy checks described above. If state law may provide additional protection, check current guidance from your state’s consumer-protection authority rather than relying on a national list of states.

How the scoring models treat medical collections

Even when a medical collection is on the report, whether it moves your score depends on which model the lender pulls. FICO Score 9 ignores paid third-party collections and gives unpaid medical collections less weight than other unpaid collections. FICO 8 has no such distinction. VantageScore announced on August 10, 2022, that VantageScore 3.0 and 4.0 would exclude all medical collection records, with the three bureaus expected to have that in place by the end of January 2023.

This used to be academic for home buyers, because mortgages ran on Classic FICO. It is less so now. Fannie Mae lists VantageScore 4.0 for approved lenders, subject to program availability, on the same price grid as Classic FICO, and FHA will accept VantageScore 4.0 for case numbers assigned from January 1, 2027. A large unpaid medical collection could therefore weigh differently depending on which model your lender chooses. Fannie Mae still requires Classic FICO for manually underwritten loans, where the minimum is 620 for a fixed rate, so do not count on the friendlier model being the one that decides your file.

What to do if one shows up

Pull your reports from all three bureaus at AnnualCreditReport.com and look at the collections section. Under the bureau policies, a medical collection should not be there if it is paid, if it started under $500, or if it is less than a year old. If one of those applies, it is an error: dispute it with each bureau that shows it.

If it is accurate, large and unpaid, check the bill first, including whether your insurer paid what it should have. Then consider paying it. Under the bureaus' 2022 policy a paid medical collection comes off the report entirely, so it stops counting in every model, FICO 8 included. On a score near a lending threshold, say an FHA borrower near 580, that can be the cheapest move available.