Yes — two years for FHA, four for conventional, and the rest of the chart is below. What almost nobody tells you is that every one of those numbers is counted to a different day, and only one of them is the day you close.

can you buy a house after chapter 7

You have read the numbers already. Two years after a Chapter 7 discharge for an FHA loan. Four years for a conventional one. Thirty-six months for USDA. They are on every page that answers this question and, as far as they go, they are right.

What none of those pages does is finish the sentence. Two years from discharge to what? Every one of those periods ends on a particular day named in a particular rulebook, and the rulebooks do not agree on which day it is. One of them stops when the lender pulls a case number. One stops at closing. One stops when the file reaches the agency. One stops when the money moves. One stops the day you apply.

Those are different days, sometimes by weeks. Somebody counting from their discharge to the wrong end of the ruler gets the wrong answer — and the direction that costs the most is the one where they decide they are not ready yet and stop asking.

So here are both halves.

The chart

A word first, because half of what follows turns on it. Almost every loan is scored by an automated system before a person ever reads the file — FHA's is called TOTAL, Fannie Mae's is DU, Freddie Mac's is LPA, USDA's is GUS. Underwritten by hand below means the file has left that system and a human being is deciding it against the written rulebook. Several of the shortest periods on this page exist only down that second road.

What each programme publishes

And the day each of those is counted to

Every period and every endpoint above comes from the rulebook that sets it: HUD Handbook 4000.1, Update 18, issued August 2026; the VA Lenders Handbook, VA Pamphlet 26-7, chapter 4; USDA Handbook HB-1-3555, chapter 10, revised November 2025; the Fannie Mae Selling Guide at B3-5.3-07 and B3-5.3-09; and the Freddie Mac Seller/Servicer Guide at sections 5202.1 and 5201.1 — the rules themselves rather than a summary of them, and the place to look if you would rather check than take my word.

The rules that are not there

If your case was dismissed rather than discharged, two of these programmes have written nothing at all

FHA's handbook carries two bankruptcy sections in origination — one for files the scorecard handles, one for files a person underwrites. Neither contains a rule for a dismissed case. The word turns up elsewhere in the handbook, in servicing and in an unrelated programme, and in neither of those two sections. VA's credit chapter does not contain the word anywhere at all.

That is not a subtlety I am raising to be clever. It is the opposite of what you will read. Pages answering this question hand you an FHA rule and a VA rule for a dismissed case, in the same table cell as the discharge rule — discharged or dismissed, two years, prior to application. The discharge half is right. The rest of it is a rule that is not in either handbook, so whoever printed it is not reading it out of one.

USDA is the only one of the three that addresses dismissal, and what it says has no number in it: where a bankruptcy has been dismissed or not completed, the lender evaluates the overall credit profile to determine whether a credit exception applies. That is a real answer, and it is a different kind of answer from a waiting period. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do attach numbers to a dismissal, and theirs are in the chart above.

So on a dismissed FHA or VA file, what I can tell you is that the written rule you are hunting for does not exist, and that anyone quoting you one is quoting something the handbook does not say. What happens to such a file is a lender's judgement exercised inside a silence — which is a far more useful thing to know before somebody hands you a confident number.

If you are still in a plan

You do not necessarily have to finish a Chapter 13 first, whatever you have read

FHA's written standard is twelve months of the payout period elapsed, every required payment made on time, and written permission from the bankruptcy court to enter into the mortgage. VA's is twelve months' worth of payments made satisfactorily, with the trustee or the bankruptcy judge approving the new credit, after which the lender may give favourable consideration. USDA's is on-time payments and written permission from the court or trustee, with twelve months of the plan documented as elapsed on a file underwritten by hand.

Three programmes, each with a written route into a mortgage from inside a live plan. You will nonetheless read, on pages that rank well for this question, that a Chapter 13 has to be discharged or dismissed before you can apply. For FHA and VA that is not what the handbooks say.

Conventional is genuinely different, and this is where the blended answer everyone publishes falls apart. On a Fannie Mae file assessed by its automated system, a Chapter 13 filed but neither discharged nor dismissed within the last four years comes back Ineligible. Same borrower, same plan, same month — allowed by three programmes and not by the fourth.

The half of the chart that only exists one way

Several of the shortest numbers here are reachable only if a person underwrites the file

Take FHA's Chapter 13 route, the one in the chart. It is a standard for manual underwriting. Run the same file through the scorecard instead and FHA asks for two years since the discharge of any bankruptcy — it does not distinguish the chapters there at all — and a file without those two years is downgraded to a Refer and underwritten by hand.

That is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to overstate in both directions. FHA does not impose a two-year wait after a Chapter 13 discharge. What it has is a routing rule: under two years, the automated road closes and the manual one opens. Its twelve-month extenuating-circumstances floor sits on that same manual road.

USDA runs the other way, and it is the only one that does. Inside thirty-six months of a Chapter 7 discharge, its automated system may still return an Accept with no credit exception required at all. Of the programmes that publish what their automated path does with a bankruptcy, USDA's is the only one whose automated approval can go under its own published figure. FHA's downgrades. Fannie Mae's returns Ineligible unless the lender overrides it and documents extenuating circumstances.

What is published, and what is applied

Freddie Mac's forty-eight months governs files a person underwrites — and its automated path publishes no figure at all

The chapter of Freddie Mac's Guide that sets those recovery periods is titled, in its own words, credit assessment for manually underwritten mortgages, and it opens by saying so. Read the chapters governing its automated path instead and bankruptcy is not discussed in them. What they say is that the system has assessed the borrower's credit reputation and determined that it is acceptable, and that the lender is not required to obtain or document an explanation of derogatory credit on those files.

⚠️ The limit on that has to travel with it, so here it is. That is a statement about what Freddie Mac publishes. It is not a statement that no period is applied. The system's logic is not in the Guide, and nobody outside Freddie Mac can see it — so anyone telling you Freddie Mac has no waiting period is telling you something they are not in a position to know.

What can be said is narrower and still worth having: the figure you will see quoted for Freddie Mac is a rule for files a human being underwrites, and for the automated ones the Guide says only that the system decides. The contrast that makes this checkable is Fannie Mae, which does publish the rule its automated system applies. One agency discloses; the other says the system has assessed it.

Where the verbs do the work

VA does not set a waiting period. It sets a gradient of judgement

You can hear it in the verbs. More than two years from discharge to closing, and the bankruptcy "may be disregarded". Between one and two years, it is "probably not possible" to determine that the borrower is a satisfactory credit risk unless two things are both true — that consumer credit was obtained since the bankruptcy and paid satisfactorily over a continued period, and that the bankruptcy was caused by circumstances beyond the borrower's control, verified. Inside twelve months, it is "generally not possible".

Not one of those is a bar. Generally not is not never, and may be disregarded is not will be. The whole gradient gets published as a single figure: two years.

There is also a VA route with no waiting period in it whatsoever. Where the Chapter 7 was caused by the failure of a self-employed borrower's business, VA sets out four conditions and no time period at all — a permanent position obtained after the business failed, no derogatory credit before the self-employment, none since the bankruptcy, and a failure not down to the borrower's own misconduct. I have not found that on a consumer page anywhere.

The word that shortens every one of these

"Extenuating circumstances" is not one standard, and two of these rulebooks disagree about divorce

Every programme in that chart has a shorter path for a bankruptcy caused by something outside your control, and the periods move a long way when it applies. FHA will come down to twelve months from discharge, on a file underwritten by hand. Fannie Mae takes its four years to two.

With one exception worth knowing, because its own paperwork invites the mistake: on a Chapter 13 discharge, Fannie Mae permits no exception at all. Its summary table shows two years in the extenuating column, which is the same two years restated rather than a reduction, and the sentence underneath says plainly that there are no exceptions to it.

Freddie Mac does not grant an exception to a clock. It decides a cause. Every event goes into one of two tables — extenuating circumstances, or financial mismanagement — and where the lender cannot document the first, the Guide instructs it to conclude the second. In the extenuating table, every bankruptcy of every chapter carries twenty-four months. And a floor sits under all of it: significant adverse or derogatory credit inside the most recent two years means the credit reputation cannot be considered acceptable, whatever caused it.

What actually counts as extenuating is written down, and it is written differently in each place. Fannie Mae: nonrecurring events beyond the borrower's control resulting in a sudden, significant and prolonged reduction in income, or a catastrophic increase in obligations. USDA: temporary, beyond the applicant's control, unlikely to recur — with examples, and its list runs to job loss, a delay or reduction in benefits, illness, a dispute over payment for defective goods, and divorce.

VA says the opposite about that last one. Divorce, it says, is not generally viewed as beyond the control of the borrower or spouse.

Neither of them is wrong. They are different programmes with different rulebooks, and the same event can be extenuating under one and not under the other. Which is the sharpest illustration on this page of the thing I am about to refuse to do.

The other clock, and it starts somewhere else again

How long it stays on your credit report is a different question with a different endpoint

The federal statute governing this sets ten years, and it sets the same ten for every chapter. It counts them from the entry of the order for relief — the beginning of the case, not the end of it. Which is an endpoint of its own, and not one of the ones in the chart above: not your discharge, and nothing to do with your loan.

The shorter figure you will read for Chapter 13 is not in that statute. It may well be something the bureaus do in practice. It is not the law, and I am not going to tell you what your report will show, because I have not seen it and the statute is the only part of this I can source.

One clause in it matters more here than anywhere else, and it is almost never mentioned: those time limits do not apply to a consumer report pulled for a credit transaction of $150,000 or more. What that means on your particular file is a question for whoever pulls it.

Where the line is

The questions I am going to hand back, and I mean hand back

Whether your circumstances count as extenuating. Whether to file, and which chapter. Whether paying a plan off early gets you to a mortgage sooner. What your discharge order did to any particular debt. What you get to keep. What to do if a creditor is behaving as though the discharge never happened.

Every one of those is a reading of your case by somebody licensed to read it. That is a question for the attorney on your case, and if you do not have one, that is the reason to get one.

On the first of them especially. USDA writes its credit-exception standard and then writes, in the same chapter, that USDA does not approve the lender's credit exception and that lenders are responsible for their credit decision. The programme that sets the standard says out loud that applying it belongs to somebody else. It is not going to be me, on a web page, about a file I have not seen.

What I am not going to do

Count for you. This page states each endpoint as a rule and stops there, and that is on purpose. Send me a discharge date and I will not hand back a date you can buy on, because the honest answer turns on which programme, which underwriting road, what caused the bankruptcy and what your credit has done since — and none of those is something a page can see.

Treat those endpoints as levers. The chart invites this, so I will say it plainly: I am not going to tell you when to have a case number pulled, or when a file ought to reach an agency, to land on the favourable side of one of them. Those are dates that happen in a transaction. A page that presents them as things to arrange is doing arithmetic on a file it has never opened.

Predict an automated system. I can tell you what each one is documented to do, and the chart does. What any of them will do with your file is a different sentence, and nobody honest writes it in advance.

If you are buying in Idaho

Everything above is federal. What programme you land in is not

None of these rules changes at a state line — they are set in Washington and they read the same everywhere. What does change is the programme you end up using and what it costs you to carry it. FHA is the one I end up in on most of these calls, and for one state I have written that programme out properly: who it is actually for, what its mortgage insurance does over the life of the loan, and where its requirements bite. How FHA works in Idaho.

Tell me the dates and I will tell you which clocks you have already beaten

Send me the dates rather than the case file: which chapter it was, what is on the discharge or the dismissal, and whether you are through the plan or still inside one. I will tell you which programmes you are already past, which you are closest to, and which day each of them is counting to. If one of those periods is behind you already, I will say so. No credit pull, no application, nothing to sign to get an answer.

The case belongs to your attorney. Which day each of these programmes is counting to belongs to me, and it is the half that decides whether you are actually still waiting.