A limitations period has to begin somewhere. Identifying that moment is where most of the difficulty in this area sits, because the answer is set by state law and the candidate events are close together.

This is what the usual candidates are, why they differ, and why the question resists a general answer.

Several Candidate Events, One of Which Governs

The most frequently applied starting point is the breach — the moment the obligation was not met as agreed, which for a revolving account is typically a missed payment that was never cured. On that theory the clock begins when the default occurred.

A second common formulation keys the start to the last payment or last activity on the account, which can be a later date than the first missed payment if partial payments continued for a time.

A third turns on acceleration or demand, where the terms of the agreement or the creditor's conduct determine when the full balance became due.

Which of these governs is a matter of the applicable state's law and of how the obligation is characterised. The characterisation itself is contested territory: whether a credit card balance is treated as a written contract, an open account, or something else varies, and the periods attached to those categories differ within a single state.

Complicating the picture further, some states have addressed the question directly by statute or by decision, fixing which characterisation applies to revolving consumer credit or specifying the triggering event. Others have left it to be argued case by case. So the degree of settledness varies alongside the length, and a confident general statement about starting points is wrong somewhere by construction.

Who Takes a View, and On What Basis

A collector deciding whether to file forms an internal view. It works from the dates in its data — date of first delinquency, date of last payment — and from an assessment of the governing law. That view drives a business decision about which accounts are worth filing on.

A court reaches the question only if it is raised in a case before it. Limitations is generally treated as a defence rather than something a court screens for on its own initiative, which is why the availability of the route and the outcome of raising it are separate matters.

Nobody publishes a determination. There is no field in the file that reads as the date the limitations period began, only the underlying dates from which one might be derived.

Collectors also differ in appetite. Two holders looking at the same file and the same law can reach different conclusions about whether filing is viable, because the assessment includes tolerance for the risk that the period has run and will be raised. That is a commercial judgement layered on top of a legal one.

Why the Dates in the File Are Not the Answer

The dates that travel with an account are operational values recorded for other purposes. The date of first delinquency exists because credit reporting requires it. The date of last payment exists because the servicing system tracked payments. Neither was recorded as an answer to a legal question.

They also drift. A date copied forward through two sales can be altered by a system that interprets a field differently, and there is no step in the chain that re-derives it from source records. A limitations analysis resting on a drifted date rests on an artefact.

Then there is the governing-law problem. Agreements frequently specify which state's law applies, residence may be elsewhere, and the account may have been opened in a third place. Which period applies is not always obvious from the file at all.

The honest summary is that the starting point is a legal conclusion drawn from imperfect operational data, and that the same file can support competing conclusions without anyone having behaved improperly.

What Can Be Read From the File

The file reliably shows what dates the successive holders recorded and, where media exists, a payment history from which activity can be reconstructed.

It does not show which event the applicable law treats as the trigger, which state's law applies, or how the obligation is characterised. Those are the three things that actually determine the answer, and none of them is a field in a data file.

What the file can show, where media exists, is inconsistency. A payment history that contradicts the recorded date of last payment is visible evidence that at least one of the operational values is unreliable, and that is the most that a file establishes on its own about the timing question.

The clock starts at an event that state law selects. The file records dates; it does not record which one counts.

Note: This explains how a process works. It is not legal advice, it is not specific to any debt, and it is not a substitute for a licensed attorney in your state. Rules and time limits vary by state and change over time — check the cited sources.