Medical Debt on Your Credit Report in 2026: What Still Shows and What You Can Fight

Did a federal rule remove medical debt from credit reports?

No, and this surprises almost everyone I talk to. The CFPB finalized a rule that would have removed medical debt from credit reports, but a federal court in the Eastern District of Texas vacated it on July 11, 2025, before it ever took effect. Not one consumer was ever protected by that rule. If a company is selling you help based on the new medical debt law, they are selling you something that does not exist.

What actually protects you today is a set of voluntary policies the three credit bureaus adopted in 2022 and 2023. Those policies survived the court decision because they were never part of the rule. They are generous, and they are the reason most medical bills never touch your report, but they are bureau policy rather than federal law, which means you should verify your own reports instead of assuming the policies were applied correctly.

What medical debt can still show on your report in 2026?

Under the current bureau policies, only one category of medical debt should appear on your credit report: an unpaid medical collection of 500 dollars or more that is at least 12 months old. Everything else is excluded. Here is the full picture of how the policies work.

• Paid medical collections are removed from your report entirely, no matter how large the balance was.
• Unpaid medical collections under 500 dollars are never reported at all.
• No medical collection can appear until it is at least one year old, which gives insurance time to pay.
• What still shows: unpaid medical collections of 500 dollars or more that are 12 or more months old.

Do medical collections still hurt your credit score?

It depends entirely on which scoring model a lender pulls, and the differences are dramatic. VantageScore 3.0 and 4.0 ignore medical collections completely, so a medical collection on your report does not touch those scores at all. FICO 9, FICO 10, and FICO 10T weigh medical collections less than other collections. But FICO 8, which is still the most widely used score, counts medical collections of 100 dollars or more at full weight. The same hospital bill can be invisible to one lender and a serious problem to the next.

Does your state protect you more than the bureaus do?

Fifteen states have passed their own laws restricting medical debt on credit reports: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. Nine of those laws took effect in 2025 or on January 1, 2026. I am in Texas, and I want my Texas readers to hear this plainly: Texas is not one of them. Here at home, the voluntary bureau policies are the protection you have.

One caveat matters even if you live in one of those fifteen states. In October 2025 the CFPB issued an interpretive rule asserting that federal law preempts these state medical debt statutes, and the state protections are now under active legal challenge. Until the courts settle it, do not build your whole plan on a state law alone. The bureau policies and your federal dispute rights are the ground that is not moving.

What can you still dispute on a medical collection?

Your dispute rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act did not go anywhere when the CFPB rule died. You can challenge any medical collection that is inaccurate, outdated, or unverifiable, for free, directly with each bureau. And because the bureau policies define what is even allowed to appear, a medical entry that breaks those policies is worth flagging too. Watch for these.

• A medical collection you already paid that is still reporting. Paid medical collections come off entirely.
• A balance under 500 dollars that is on your report anyway.
• A medical collection reporting before it was 12 months old.
• A balance that is wrong, inflated by fees, or already covered by insurance according to your records.
• A collection that is not yours, or the same bill reported by two different agencies at once.
• A date of first delinquency that is newer than reality, which illegally stretches the seven-year clock.

Should you pay a medical collection that is reporting?

Paying often makes more sense for medical collections than for any other kind of debt, because under current bureau policy a paid medical collection is removed from your report entirely. That is not true for regular collections, which can keep reporting as paid for the rest of their seven-year window. So if a 500-dollar-plus medical collection is accurate and dragging your FICO 8 score down, paying it does not just update the status. It deletes the entry.

Be honest with yourself about the order of operations, though. Verify the bill first, dispute anything inaccurate first, and only pay what you truly owe. Nobody, including me, can remove a medical collection that is accurate, current, and verifiable while it sits unpaid, and anyone who promises that is breaking the law. What a done-for-you service like mine handles is the verification and dispute grind across all three bureaus. Every one of those steps is also free to do yourself.