Question

Does Filing Bankruptcy Raise or Lower Your Credit Score?

Written by JaredLast reviewed 2026-08-25

Does filing bankruptcy raise or lower your credit score?

Both, and which one depends heavily on the score a filer starts with. LendingTree's October 2024 study, covering users of its own platform who filed bankruptcy, found that scores rose by 69 points on average within one month of filing. But that average belongs to a cohort whose scores averaged 533 before they filed, and a bankruptcy attorney's published analysis of the same study puts the turning point near 620 — below it scores rose, above it they fell. Most of this vertical publishes only the 69-point rise. Both halves belong to the same body of reporting, and only the first half is LendingTree's own published number.

What did LendingTree's October 2024 study actually find?

LendingTree looked at its own platform users who had a recent bankruptcy on their credit report in July 2024 and found the group's average score moved from about 533 in June 2024 to about 602 in August 2024 — a 69-point gain, which LendingTree describes as the change one month after filing. Note the exact period: the comparison is a June reading against an August reading around a July filing, not a rolling 30-day window measured from each filer's own petition date. That's a real number from a named source with a named date. It is not, on its own, a statement about what happens to a "typical" credit score in bankruptcy, because the cohort it describes started in the low-to-mid 500s, a range already reflecting serious pre-filing credit trouble.

The piece most competitor pages drop comes from a second source, and it is worth being exact about what that source is. Robert Weed, a Virginia bankruptcy attorney, wrote up the same LendingTree study on his firm's blog, and the American Bankruptcy Institute republished that post in its news feed: scores below roughly 620 generally rose at filing, and scores above roughly 620 generally fell. A single average masks that split entirely. But the 620 line is one practitioner's reading of the study, carried by ABI's feed rather than produced by ABI's researchers, and it is not a threshold LendingTree states in its own published write-up. Treat it as a direction of travel, not a calibrated cutoff.

Why do lower starting scores rise while higher starting scores fall?

Because the starting point determines what filing changes. A score already deep in the 500s is usually the product of accounts that are severely delinquent, maxed out, or both — conditions that, on their own, are already scored about as harshly as a scoring model will score them. A score above 620 has more room to fall, because it likely reflects accounts that were still current, with utilization and payment history still counting in the filer's favor right up until the filing itself became the newest, largest negative item on the file.

One caveat on the row that competitor pages usually add and this one does not. LendingTree does report an average gain for a group it labels "deep subprime," and it says that group gained the most of any credit score group in the sample. What LendingTree never states is which scores that label covers. So the figure exists, but the numeric band it is routinely attached to across this vertical — a "deep subprime" range of 300 to 500 — is supplied by the pages republishing it, not by the study. A point figure is only as precise as the band it is pinned to, and that band is missing, so neither is reproduced here.

What's actually driving the score change in that first month?

LendingTree doesn't publish the scoring-factor mechanics behind its own finding, so this part is informed inference, not a sourced causal claim. Two forces plausibly point in opposite directions at once. Working toward a higher score: accounts included in a filing get re-reported, and myFICO's own guidance tells filers to check that every account included in the bankruptcy shows a balance of zero. Zeroed balances on maxed-out revolving accounts cut reported utilization, one of the more heavily weighted inputs in most scoring models. Note that this mechanism has to be the filing, not the discharge — a Chapter 7 discharge does not arrive inside a one-month window, and a Chapter 13 discharge waits on a plan that runs three or five years under 11 U.S.C. §§ 1322(d) and 1325(b)(4) before § 1328(a) discharge is entered, so nothing the study measured can be discharge-driven. Working toward a lower score: the bankruptcy filing itself becomes a new public-record item on the credit file, and for a filer whose accounts were still being scored favorably beforehand, that new negative item can outweigh whatever utilization relief filing brings.

Which force wins depends on how much room a given starting score had left to lose versus gain, which is consistent with the below-620/above-620 split described in the attorney analysis ABI's feed carried, even without a published explanation of the mechanism itself.

Is the LendingTree number the same as a FICO Score?

No. LendingTree's 69-point figure comes from its own platform's users who had a bankruptcy on their credit report in July 2024 — a proprietary sample of people who use that service, not a FICO Score panel and not data published by a credit bureau directly. LendingTree does not name the scoring model behind the June and August readings. It's a real, dated, named finding, but it describes one company's user base at one point in time, not a national or FICO-branded statistic.

myFICO, which does speak specifically to the FICO Score, publishes a point figure but not a comparable one. Its estimate runs the other direction and covers a different starting point: someone in the mid-700s before filing "might see their score fall by 100 points or more," while someone starting with already-damaged credit sees a smaller hit, because there was less untouched credit standing to lose. That appears on myFICO's "Considering Bankruptcy" page, not on either of its bankruptcy-duration pages, and it is an illustrative answer to a reader letter rather than a study result. It is consistent in direction with the below-620/above-620 split, but the two sources measure different things and shouldn't be quoted as if they were the same statistic.

How long does a bankruptcy filing stay on a credit report, regardless of how the score recovers?

Longer than any of the score-recovery numbers above might suggest. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1681c(a)(1), a bankruptcy case can appear on a credit report for up to 10 years from the date of the order for relief, and that 10-year ceiling applies to every chapter under Title 11, including Chapter 13. A separate, shorter removal timeline — commonly described as 7 years for a completed Chapter 13 — is a practice of the nationwide credit bureaus, not something the statute itself requires. myFICO describes it in exactly those terms, attributing the 7-year and 10-year purge dates to the bureaus' own rules rather than to the FCRA. Section 1681c(a)(1) sets a 10-year ceiling; it does not set a 7-year floor for anyone.

That distinction matters for reading the score-recovery numbers above correctly. A score can recover, by any of the measures on this page, well before the bankruptcy notation itself is required to leave the report. Score movement and the record's presence on file are two different clocks, and nothing here shortens the second one. The reporting-duration question is worked through in full at how long bankruptcy stays on your credit report.

What this means for financing during that window

A rising or falling score in the first month after filing isn't the number a lender underwrites against months later. For how financing timing actually works once a Chapter 7 case is filed, including when the automatic stay does and doesn't apply, see car loan after Chapter 7 bankruptcy. This page explains what the available data on credit scores says and doesn't say; it isn't a projection of what any individual filer's own score will do, which depends on the accounts on that filer's specific report. For more on how this site verifies the figures it publishes, see the editorial policy, and for more explainers on bankruptcy and vehicle financing, see the learn hub.