Medical Debt and Your Credit Report: Every State's Law

On January 7, 2025 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule it said "will remove an estimated $49 billion in medical bills from the credit reports of about 15 million Americans" and "ban the inclusion of medical bills on credit reports used by lenders." It never took effect. The Bureau's own page now carries the ending: "On July 11, 2025, the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Texas vacated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rule ... upon the joint request of the Bureau and the plaintiffs in Cornerstone Credit Union League v. CFPB. The court agreed with the Bureau and the plaintiffs that the rule exceeded the Bureau's statutory authority."

So as of today there is no federal law keeping medical debt off your credit report. What exists instead is a patchwork: state statutes in a growing list of states, the credit bureaus' voluntary policies, and the federal tax rule that governs how nonprofit hospitals may collect. Each is real, each has edges, and the edges are where people get hurt.

We opened each state's statute, or the attorney general's consumer page where no statute exists, on October 27 and 28, 2026. The table quotes the operative sentence and gives the date the law took effect. "Bars reporting" means a health care provider or collector may not furnish a medical debt to a credit bureau, or a bureau may not list it, or both. "Limits reporting" means the state conditions reporting on notice, waiting periods or hospital procedures without banning it. Where the state has no law, the row says what we checked, because a negative finding is only as good as the search behind it.

Separately from any law, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion announced in 2022 and 2023 that they would remove paid medical collection debt from reports, stop listing medical collections under $500, and wait one year after a medical account goes to collections before reporting it. The CFPB's January 2025 release describes these as "changes made by the three nationwide credit reporting conglomerates." These are policies, not law, so they can change without a vote, and they do not stop a lender from asking about medical debt directly. They do mean that a single $380 lab bill sent to collections should not be on your report at all, and that a paid medical collection of any size should come off.

About three in five community hospitals are nonprofits, and their tax exemption comes with collection limits in 26 CFR 1.501(r)-6. Reporting you to a credit bureau is on the regulation's list of "extraordinary collection actions," alongside selling the debt, suing, garnishing wages and placing liens. The hospital may not take any of them until it has made "reasonable efforts to determine whether the individual is eligible for assistance" under its financial assistance policy, must wait "at least 120 days from the date the hospital facility provides the first post-discharge billing statement," and must give you written notice "at least 30 days before first initiating" any of them, with a plain-language summary of the assistance policy attached. If a nonprofit hospital reported you before any of that happened, the report itself is the violation. Our charity care guide covers how to apply and what each state requires.

• Get the reports. All three are free weekly at the official site, annualcreditreport.com. Find every medical collection, the collector's name and the date it was placed.
• Check it against the rules above. Under $500? Paid? Less than a year old? In a state that bars reporting? From a nonprofit hospital that never offered financial assistance? Any one of those is a basis to dispute.
• Dispute in writing with each bureau under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, naming the account and the reason, and keep the certified mail receipt. The bureau has 30 days to investigate and must remove information it cannot verify.
• Dispute with the collector too, and ask for validation of the debt in writing within 30 days of its first contact; a collector that cannot validate must stop.
• File with your state attorney general if the state bars reporting and the debt is still listed, and with the CFPB, which still takes complaints about credit reporting even though its rule was vacated.
• Apply for financial assistance anyway. Under the federal rule, an application filed within 240 days of the first bill still has to be processed, and a reduced balance is usually followed by the collector dropping the report.

Medical debt is the most common item in collections in the United States, and it lands on the households with the least cushion: uninsured, underinsured, paid hourly, and sent to the emergency room because the clinic could not see them. A collection line on a credit report then raises the cost of a car loan, a lease, sometimes a job. The CFPB's own analysis found that medical bills on a credit report are "a poor predictor of whether they will repay a loan," which is why the rule it wrote would have raised affected consumers' scores by an average of 20 points. The state laws in the table are the part of that rule that survived, in the states that passed them. If yours has not, the bureau policies and the hospital rule are still yours to use.