A personal bankruptcy is a formal, court-supervised process administered through a Licensed Insolvency Trustee, and it is reported to the bureaus as a public record rather than simply as a trade line entry. The bureau file shows the filing date and, once the process concludes, the discharge date — the point at which the bankrupt individual is legally released from most of their debts. The gap between filing and discharge varies by case, and it is the discharge date, where one exists, that generally governs how long the bankruptcy continues to show.
It is worth being precise with clients about this: filing for bankruptcy and being discharged from bankruptcy are two different dates, and retention periods are typically measured from discharge, not from the original filing, except where no discharge has occurred at all.
Equifax's own published guidance describes a first bankruptcy as remaining on file for 6 years after the discharge date, or, where there is no recorded discharge date, 7 years after the date the bankruptcy was filed. Based on Equifax's own description of its practice, this period is applied the same way across the country rather than varying by province.
This consistency makes Equifax the simpler of the two bureaus to reason about for this particular item — one rule, nationally applied — which is not the case for every category of information, as the province-specific judgment retention in Module 07 already illustrated.
TransUnion's retention period for a first bankruptcy is explicitly province-dependent. British Columbia, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick retain the record for six years from the date of discharge. Ontario, Quebec, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador retain it for seven years from the date of discharge — a full extra year beyond the other provinces and beyond Equifax's national standard.
This is one of the more concrete, checkable examples of why 'how long does this stay on file' cannot be answered with a single number without first asking two follow-up questions: which bureau, and which province. A borrower discharged from a first bankruptcy in Alberta and pulled on TransUnion will see it clear a full year earlier than an otherwise identical borrower discharged in Ontario.
A second or later bankruptcy is treated much more severely by both bureaus: the record — and, where a first bankruptcy had already cleared or was still showing, both bankruptcies together — is reported for 14 years from the date of discharge. This roughly doubles the standard first-bankruptcy period and reflects that a repeat filing is read as a materially different risk signal than a single, one-time event.
For underwriting purposes, this means a borrower's second bankruptcy does not simply replace the first one on the file — it can effectively extend the visible history of both well beyond what either would have carried alone.
Before advising a client on when a past bankruptcy will stop showing on their file, confirm three things: which bureau the lender in question will pull, which province governs the file if the lender is TransUnion, and whether this was a first or subsequent bankruptcy. Getting any one of these wrong can mean telling a client their file will be clear a year, or in the case of a second bankruptcy, several years, earlier than it actually will be — a mistake that damages trust badly if discovered mid-process rather than caught in advance.
A borrower's first bankruptcy was discharged three years ago in Ontario. A lender is going to pull their TransUnion file. Is the bankruptcy still reportable?
Ontario is one of the four provinces where TransUnion applies a 7-year-from-discharge retention period for a first bankruptcy, so a bankruptcy discharged only three years ago is well within that window and will still appear. The 6-year period is what applies in most other provinces, not Ontario specifically, so applying it uniformly everywhere is the exact mistake this module warns against. Bankruptcies are absolutely reportable to both bureaus, not just Equifax.
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