Being Sued for Credit Card Debt: What to Do in 30 Days

File a written answer with the court before the deadline printed on your summons. That is the single action that changes the outcome. Debt lawsuits are overwhelmingly resolved by default judgment — not because the claims are strong, but because the people served do not respond.

An answer keeps the case a negotiation. No answer hands over wage garnishment and bank levies.

Day 1: read the papers and find two things

The answer deadline. Printed on the summons. It is commonly 20 to 30 days but varies by state and by court, and it is calculated from the date of service. Write it on a calendar today.

Who is suing you. Frequently a debt buyer rather than your original bank, because charged-off accounts are sold in bulk. Read the caption on the summons: if the plaintiff is a company you never held an account with, the claim has reached you through at least one sale of the account, and that is where the most common real defense in these cases begins.

Then: do not call the plaintiff’s attorney yet. Anything you say about the debt can be used, and an acknowledgment can affect the limitations analysis. Read first, respond in writing, negotiate later.

Days 2–7: check the four defenses

Not excuses — the four things that actually decide these cases.

1. The statute of limitations has expired. If your state’s period has run, the claim cannot succeed — but only if you raise it in the answer. The court will not notice it for you. Check whether the debt is time-barred.

2. The plaintiff cannot prove it owns the debt. A debt buyer must establish the chain of assignment from the original creditor to itself, tied to your specific account. Bulk-purchased portfolios sometimes arrive with spreadsheets rather than documents. This is the plaintiff’s burden, not a technicality to be sheepish about.

3. The amount is wrong. Post-charge-off interest and fees added by a purchaser are frequently challenged, and sometimes not supported by the underlying agreement.

4. It is not your debt. Mistaken identity, a family member’s account, or identity theft. Do not ignore a suit because you believe the debt is not yours — that produces a judgment against you regardless.

Days 7–20: file the answer

Most state courts publish an answer form for debt collection cases, and many have a self-help center that will help you complete it. A basic answer does three things:

• Responds to each numbered allegation — admit, deny, or state that you lack knowledge sufficient to admit or deny. Deny what you do not know to be true.
• Raises your affirmative defenses, including the statute of limitations if it applies.
• Gets filed with the court and served on the plaintiff’s attorney, following the instructions in the papers.

There may be a filing fee, and a fee waiver is generally available for low incomes.

An imperfect answer filed on time beats a perfect answer filed late, and both beat silence by a wide margin.

In parallel: get free help

This is one of the areas where free legal representation genuinely exists and is underused:

• Legal aid organizations handle consumer debt defense for qualifying incomes.
• Law school clinics take these cases and are often excellent on them.
• Court self-help centers will not represent you but will help with the forms.
• Consumer attorneys sometimes take these on contingency where the collector’s conduct violated federal law, because the statute provides for fees.

Call before the deadline, not after.

After you answer: what usually happens

The case moves into discovery and negotiation. Two common paths:

A request for documents. You can ask the plaintiff to produce the account agreement, the statement history, and the chain of assignment. Cases sometimes end here.

A settlement. Collectors settle lawsuits routinely, often for less than the claim, because litigating is expensive relative to the amounts involved. Your position after answering is materially better than before, which is the practical argument for answering even when you owe the money and do not dispute it. See settling the case.

If you settle, make sure the resolution is documented with the court so the case is dismissed rather than left pending, and get the terms in writing before paying anything.

What a judgment means, if one is entered

So the stakes are concrete: wage garnishment (federally capped for consumer debt at the lesser of 25% of disposable earnings or the amount above $217.50 a week, with several states more protective), bank levies, a lien on real property in many states, post-judgment interest, and renewal for years. See what a judgment enables.

If a default judgment has already been entered, ask about a motion to vacate — courts can set aside default judgments for improper service or other grounds, and there are deadlines. That is a lawyer question and it is worth asking quickly.

The option that ends the case entirely

Filing bankruptcy triggers the automatic stay, halting the lawsuit immediately, and in some circumstances a garnishment already underway can be undone. That is not a reason to file over one lawsuit — but if the suit is one of several problems and the total debt is beyond your capacity, it addresses all of it at once. See how filing stops the suit.

Who generates these complaints, ranked by volume

If the plaintiff named on your summons is a company you never opened an account with, you are looking at the ordinary shape of a modern debt lawsuit rather than an anomaly. The federal complaint record shows how few companies that business runs through. We pulled every debt collection complaint in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s public database for the twelve months to September 1, 2026 — 324,326 of them — and ranked them by the company they were filed against.

The four largest respondents are all debt buyers, and not one of them lent anybody anything. CL Holdings drew 22,546 complaints, 6.95% of the year. Encore Capital Group drew 18,998, or 5.86%. Resurgent Capital Services drew 18,367, 5.66%. Portfolio Recovery Associates drew 17,542, 5.41%. Between them that is better than one complaint in four. The first card issuer on the list, Capital One, sits fourteenth with 3,994.

That is the practical answer to the question people ask first when the papers arrive. The caption is unfamiliar because the account was sold, and the buyers doing the buying are a short list.

The defense the top of that list is built on

A debt buyer at the top of the ranking is not a curiosity. It is the reason the second of the four defenses above — that the plaintiff cannot prove it owns your account — decides so many of these cases. A company that bought your account in a portfolio has to connect itself to your specific account number through every sale in between, and it has to do that with documents rather than a spreadsheet row.

The database also records what the company said for the record. The most common on-the-record position a collection company took over the year was to say nothing publicly: 62,949 complaints, 19.41% of the total, closed with the company having responded to the consumer and the bureau and choosing not to provide a public response. The most common substantive position covered 19,425 complaints, 5.99%, where the company stated it believed it had acted appropriately as authorized by contract or law. That is the sentence your answer argues with, and note what it assumes: that a contract exists, and that its terms reach the company invoking them.

Two much smaller buckets are worth naming for contrast. The company disputed the facts presented in the complaint in 1,715 cases, 0.53%, and said it could not verify or dispute the facts in 1,248 cases, 0.38%. Most complaints in this category are not resolved by an argument about the facts, because most of them never reach one.

Three credit bureaus in the collection top seven

The fifth, sixth and seventh places on the list are not collectors at all. TransUnion appears with 13,803 complaints, 4.26%; Equifax with 12,706, 3.92%; Experian with 12,000, 3.70%. They sit inside the debt collection product because the complaint is about the collection account as it appears on a credit file — the tradeline — rather than about a phone call or a letter.

For somebody holding a summons that distinction matters more than it looks. The lawsuit and the credit report are two separate fights with separate procedures, separate counterparties and separate deadlines, and winning one does nothing automatic to the other. A dismissed case does not delete the tradeline, and a deleted tradeline does not end the case. If the reporting is the part doing the damage, it is a different filing: see how collection accounts come off a credit report.

The table below groups the ranking the way it actually behaves: four buyers, three bureaus, and a long remainder that the bureau does not break out.

How we counted, and what a ranking of companies cannot tell you

One query against the bureau’s public complaint API, filtered to the debt collection product and to a fixed twelve-month window of receipt dates, read straight from the response’s own company aggregation. Nothing was sampled and nothing was interpolated. The bureau breaks out its forty largest respondents for a filtered query, which is about two thirds of the year’s complaints; the rest arrive only inside the total, which is why the last block of the table above is a subtraction rather than a count.

One check is worth stating, because it is the check that would have caught a filtering error. The issue aggregation for this same query covers 100% of the filtered total — its buckets sum to the total exactly — so the product filter is being applied to the aggregations and not only to the headline count. We did not run that reconciliation on the company aggregation: a top-forty list is not expected to sum to the total, so it cannot be checked that way.

What this does not say.

• A complaint is a complaint, not a finding. Nothing in this ranking says a company broke the law, and nothing in it says a company did not.
• This ranks consumer complaints, not lawsuits. The bureau’s database carries no court case number, so no row here can be read as a count of suits filed, and the company suing you may not be the company at the top of this list.
• The bureau attributes each complaint to the company as it is named. A parent and its subsidiaries can appear as one row or as several, and we made no attempt to re-group corporate families, so a group filing under several names is understated against one that does not.
• Only the bureau’s forty largest respondents are broken out for a filtered query. A smaller collector — including one large enough to sue you — may not appear in the ranking at all.
• Complaint volume tracks how many people complain, which tracks portfolio size and consumer-facing contact. It is not a rate: none of these numbers is divided by the number of accounts a company holds, because the database does not publish that.

Frequently asked questions

Who is suing me if I never had an account with that company? Almost certainly a debt buyer that purchased your charged-off account in a portfolio. The four companies drawing the most federal collection complaints in the twelve months to September 2026 were all buyers rather than lenders: CL Holdings with 22,546 complaints, Encore Capital Group with 18,998, Resurgent Capital Services with 18,367 and Portfolio Recovery Associates with 17,542. Read the caption on the summons and check it against the creditor you actually dealt with.

How long do I have to answer a credit card lawsuit? The deadline is printed on the summons and is commonly twenty to thirty days from the date you were served, but it varies by state and by court. Rely on the document in your hand rather than on any general figure, and write the date on a calendar the day the papers arrive.

Can I make a debt buyer prove it owns my account? Yes, and it is the plaintiff’s burden rather than a technicality you have to apologize for. Once you have answered you can ask it to produce the account agreement, the statement history and the chain of assignment from the original creditor to itself, tied to your account number. Cases sometimes end at that request.

Does answering the lawsuit make things worse for me? No. Answering keeps the case a negotiation and preserves every defense you have, including the statute of limitations, which a court will not apply for you. Not answering produces a default judgment for the amount claimed plus costs and interest, and that judgment is what unlocks garnishment and bank levies.

What if they are suing for more than I remember owing? Deny the amount in your answer rather than admitting it. Post-charge-off interest and fees added by a purchaser are frequently challenged and are not always supported by the underlying agreement, and the plaintiff has to prove the figure it pleaded rather than merely assert it.

Is it worth filing a CFPB complaint about the company suing me? It is worth filing about the underlying conduct, but treat it as a separate track. It does not extend the answer deadline on your summons and it is not a defense. Note too what companies put on the record: of 324,326 collection complaints in the year to September 2026, 19,425 closed with the company stating it believed it had acted as its contract or the law allowed.

This article describes the general sequence for responding to a consumer debt lawsuit. It is not legal advice. Civil procedure, deadlines, defenses and garnishment rules are state law and vary substantially. If you have been served, get advice specific to your court — free help is often available.