Late payments stay on your report for 7 years, public records for 10, and old maxed-out cards you already paid down are generally a non-issue. There was a push a while back for lenders to review trended data, meaning your historical monthly balance patterns, specifically to catch borrowers who pay cards down right before applying to inflate the score temporarily. In practice, we are not even sure that data still feeds the automated underwriting systems, and we have never seen it change an automated decision on an FHA, VA, or USDA loan. What shows up and does matter is a late payment. A few months of maxed cards that were then paid off, with nothing missed, reads very differently to underwriting. On how long items linger: a missed payment reports for 7 years, while public records like judgments, bankruptcies, and foreclosures stay for 10, and those stale negatives can weigh on a score more than people expect. One of us had a decade-old late payment finally age off, and the score jumped from around 790 to 820 within days of it dropping. A single old ding can hold back an otherwise clean file that much. The takeaway: pay everything on time from here forward, since payment history is what underwriting weighs most, and do not lose sleep over past high balances that are already resolved.