How Long After a Bankruptcy or Foreclosure Can You Buy a House?

Can I buy a house after filing Chapter 7 in Washington?

Most people who ask me this question have already decided the answer is "not yet." They're usually wrong, and often by years.

Two things cause that. The first is that the waiting period depends entirely on which loan program you use — the same person can be four years away on one program and already eligible on another, on the same day. The second is that almost nobody starts the clock on the right date.

Here's what the rules actually say.

The short version

Look at the Chapter 13 column, then the Chapter 7 column, then the gap between FHA and conventional. That spread is why "how long do I have to wait" has no single answer — and why getting told no by one lender tells you less than people assume.

Chapter 13: you may not have to wait at all

This is the single most under-known rule in the business, so I'll say it plainly.

FHA, VA and USDA all allow you to get a mortgage while you are still in an active Chapter 13 plan. You do not have to wait for the discharge.

What each one wants:

• FHA — at least 12 months of your payout period elapsed, all payments made on time, and written permission from the bankruptcy court.
• VA — 12 months of payments made as agreed, with trustee or court permission. VA treats completing the plan as credit having been re-established.
• USDA — payments current and on time, with written permission from the court or trustee.

These files are manually underwritten, which means a human reads your whole picture instead of a computer scoring it. That takes longer and asks more of you. It also approves people every month.

The catch worth knowing: some lenders simply decline active Chapter 13 files as a matter of policy, even though the agencies allow them. That's a lender choice, not a rule. If you were turned down while in a plan, you may have been turned down by the wrong lender rather than by the program.

Where the clock actually starts

This is where most of the lost years come from. Every program measures from a different event, and to a different endpoint.

The starting date:

• Chapter 7 — the discharge date. Not the filing date.
• Chapter 13, in-plan eligibility — the start of your payout period, which is effectively the filing date. This is why an in-plan file can be eligible years before a discharged one.
• Chapter 13, conventional — discharge date if the plan completed, dismissal date if it didn't. Those carry very different waiting periods (see below).
• Foreclosure — the date title actually transferred out of your name. Not the day you moved out, not the day you got the notice. Foreclosures in Washington often take many months from first notice to trustee's sale, and that gap is time on your clock.
• Short sale / deed-in-lieu — the closing or recording date.

The ending date differs too, which surprises people:

• FHA measures to the date your FHA case number is assigned — which can be pulled the day you become eligible.
• Conventional measures to the loan's disbursement date on manual files; the automated system uses the credit report date as a stand-in.

If you're close to a threshold, these details are worth a phone call. I've seen people wait an extra six months for no reason because they were counting from the wrong day.

The discharge-versus-dismissal trap

If you filed Chapter 13 and are going conventional, this one detail is worth thousands of dollars and years of your life:

• Plan completed and discharged → 2 years.
• Plan dismissed before completion → 4 years.

Same chapter, same person, double the wait. Fannie Mae gives you credit for the years you spent making plan payments only if you finished. And unlike Chapter 7, there is no extenuating-circumstances shortcut below the two-year mark on a discharged Chapter 13 — don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

If your plan is close to completion, finishing it may be worth more than anything else you could do for your file.

Foreclosure, short sale and deed-in-lieu

They are not the same event, and conventional treats them very differently:

Two things worth pulling out.

FHA's short sale exception is real. If you sold short but were never late — which happens more than you'd think, when someone gets ahead of a move — there may be no waiting period at all.

Conventional's foreclosure wait is 7 years, not 4. Its three-year extenuating-circumstances path exists, but it comes with conditions: 90% maximum loan-to-value, and it has to be a primary residence purchase. Anyone quoting you "three years for conventional" without those conditions is quoting half a rule.

A note for veterans: if you lost a home that had a VA loan on it, that's a separate issue from the waiting period. It reduces your remaining entitlement. Worth checking before you plan around it.

"Extenuating circumstances" — what it actually means

Every program has a shortcut for events that were genuinely outside your control. It's real, and it's narrower than people hope.

The standard is roughly: something serious, documented, temporary, beyond your control, and unlikely to happen again. A job loss, a serious illness, the death of a wage earner, a divorce that took the household from two incomes to one. What it isn't: overspending, a business that didn't work out, or a decision you'd make differently now.

It also has to be documented. Not explained — documented.

And note the same caveat as the Chapter 13 rule: an agency permitting a shortcut doesn't mean every lender will underwrite it. Many won't.

About "FHA Back to Work" — it ended in 2016

You will find articles describing an FHA program that cuts the waiting period to 12 months after a foreclosure or bankruptcy caused by a documented economic event.

That program expired on September 30, 2016. It has not been replaced, and there is no successor at FHA or anywhere else. Every one of those pages is out of date, and a few of them still rank well, which is why people arrive at my office thinking they qualify for something that hasn't existed in a decade.

What remains are the ordinary extenuating-circumstances provisions described above.

The rules are floors, not guarantees

Everything in this article is the agency minimum. Individual lenders add their own requirements on top — the industry calls them overlays — and they vary a lot.

Common ones: refusing to use the extenuating-circumstances shortcuts at all, declining active Chapter 13 files, or simply not doing manual underwriting, which quietly turns every "eligible with a manual underwrite" path into a no.

The practical consequence: being declined by one lender does not mean you're ineligible. It means you were declined by one lender. That is not a sales line — it's the most common reason people who could buy don't.

What to do now

1. Find the actual date. Discharge date, dismissal date, or the date title transferred. Pull the document; don't go from memory.
2. Count to each program separately. You may already be eligible for one and years out on another.
3. Have someone check before you assume. It's a five-minute conversation and it costs nothing.

Seventeen years and several market cycles in, the thing I keep running into is people who have been sitting out for years past their eligibility date because nobody ever ran the numbers with them.

The conversation is always free.

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What this looks like for a real household

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