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Introduced April 8, 2025 by Stephen Cohen · Last progress April 8, 2025
The bill protects people with expired debts from collection harassment and clarifies enforcement, but may reduce creditors’ recovery (potentially raising costs for consumers), impose compliance costs on collectors, and create risk of consumer confusion about valid obligations.
Low‑income consumers with time‑barred (expired) debts will no longer be legally targeted by debt collectors, reducing harassment, lawsuits, and financial stress.
Low‑income consumers will face fewer erroneous collections and credit disputes, lowering out‑of‑pocket costs and time spent contesting invalid claims.
Courts, regulators, and financial institutions will have clearer FDCPA rules, improving enforcement and deterrence against abusive collection practices.
Consumers broadly could face higher prices or fees if legitimate creditors recover less from old debts and shift increased losses onto customers.
Low‑income consumers may mistakenly assume a debt is time‑barred and ignore valid obligations, risking damaged credit, renewed collections, or other financial harms if not properly informed.
Debt buyers and collection firms (financial institutions) will incur compliance costs and increased litigation risk to update systems and accurately identify statutes of limitations.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Prohibits debt collectors from collecting or attempting to collect consumer debts after the statute of limitations has expired.
Prohibits debt collectors from collecting or trying to collect consumer debts once the statute of limitations for that debt has expired. It adds a new subsection to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act that makes collecting time‑barred consumer debts an unlawful act and updates the Act’s table of contents to reflect the change. The change creates an explicit, statutory bar on attempts to collect expired debts by debt collectors, which could reduce collection contacts and lawsuits over old debts and give consumers clearer protection against attempts to enforce time‑barred obligations.