Iowa gives creditors ten years to sue on a written contract and five on anything else, and its statute titled “Open account” sets no deadline at all. That last point is the most commonly misstated thing about Iowa debt law. Section 614.5 decides when the clock starts on an open account. It never says how long the clock runs.
The deadlines, and where each one is written
| What is being collected | Deadline to file suit | Statute |
|---|---|---|
| Written contract | 10 years | Iowa Code § 614.1(5)(a) |
| Unwritten contract, and all actions not otherwise provided for | 5 years | Iowa Code § 614.1(4) |
| Rent | 5 years | Iowa Code § 614.1(5)(b) |
| Judgment of a court of record | 20 years | Iowa Code § 614.1(6) |
Iowa’s genuinely unusual number is not the ten years on contracts, which several states match. It is twenty years on a judgment, with no limit at all on a judgment for child support, spousal support, or distribution of marital assets. Section 614.3 adds a wrinkle in the other direction: no action may be brought on an Iowa judgment within nine years of its rendition without leave of court for good cause shown, and that nine-year block does not pause the twenty-year clock.
Section 614.1(4) also serves as Iowa’s residual catch-all, covering “all other actions not otherwise provided for.” Do not use § 614.1(12) or the personal injury periods for a debt claim. Contract debt is fully addressed by subsections (4) and (5).
The open account statute does not set a deadline
Section 614.5 is one sentence:
When there is a continuous, open, current account, the cause of action shall be deemed to have accrued on the date of the last item therein, as proved on the trial.
Notice what is missing. There is no number in it. The section is titled “Open account” and is routinely cited as though it created an Iowa open-account limitations period, but it does nothing except fix the accrual date. The length still comes from § 614.1(4) or § 614.1(5), and the code never says which of those an open account falls into. Note also the evidentiary tail: the date of the last item must be “proved on the trial,” which puts the burden on whoever is relying on it.
The categorization gap is real and we are not going to paper over it. We searched the complete Code of Iowa 2026, all eight official volumes and roughly 47 million characters of text. The phrase “revolving credit” does not appear anywhere in the Iowa Code. “Credit card” appears 27 times, all of them in chapters 537, 535, and 714, and never once in chapter 614. “Account stated” appears zero times in the entire code. Whether an Iowa credit card account is a ten-year written contract, a five-year unwritten one, or an open account under § 614.5 is not answerable from the statutes. Any source giving you a confident single number for Iowa card debt is drawing on case law, not the code.
One related correction. Iowa’s version of the uniform commercial code contains no limitations section for negotiable instruments. Section 554.3118 is captioned “Accrual of cause of action” and only sets accrual. Iowa’s own cross-reference note under § 554.2725 points the reader elsewhere: “Period of limitation, chapter 614.” A written note therefore runs ten years under § 614.1(5)(a).
What restarts the clock, and what the code will not tell you
Section 614.11 is titled “Admission in writing — new promise” and reads in full:
Causes of action founded on contract are revived by an admission in writing, signed by the party to be charged, that the debt is unpaid, or by a like new promise to pay the same.
A writing is required, a signature is required, and the word “like” carries both requirements into the new promise. The operative verb is “revived,” meaning a fresh period rather than an extension.
Partial payment is not mentioned. Not in § 614.11, and not anywhere in the Iowa Code. We searched the full corpus for “part payment” and “partial payment” near limitations, revival, and accrual language and found nothing. Since § 614.11 conditions revival on a signed writing, and a bare payment is neither signed nor a writing, the widely repeated claim that a payment restarts Iowa’s clock has no statutory support. Whether Iowa courts read a payment exception around § 614.11 is a case law question we mark unverified.
Iowa debt collection statute of limitations: what the code does not prohibit
We read Iowa Code § 537.7103, the prohibited practices section of the Iowa Debt Collection Practices Act, in full, along with § 537.5108 on unconscionable collection and the whole of chapter 714. The Iowa Code contains no restriction on collecting, suing on, or threatening suit on a time-barred debt, and no requirement to disclose a debt’s age. That is a searched conclusion across the complete code rather than an assumption.
The nearest hook is § 537.7103(1)(f), which bars “an action or threat to take an action prohibited by this chapter or any other law.” For that to reach a stale collection suit, filing one would have to be prohibited by Iowa law, and it is not. Iowa limitations operate as a defense the defendant raises, not as a ban on filing. Whether Iowa courts or the Attorney General read that clause, or the misrepresentation clause at § 537.7103(4)(e), to cover time-barred suits is not something the code settles.
Chapter 537’s protections are also narrower than they look. Section 537.7102(3) defines “debt” as an obligation “arising out of a consumer credit transaction,” so the act does not reach every debt.
One asymmetry worth knowing
Iowa does restrict written reaffirmations, but only for one kind of debt. Section 537.7103(5)(b) makes it a prohibited practice to seek or obtain a written acknowledgment affirming an obligation “which has been discharged in bankruptcy” without disclosing the consequences and the fact that the debtor is not legally obligated to make the affirmation.
There is no parallel protection for a time-barred debt, even though § 614.11 makes a signed writing precisely the instrument that revives one. Iowa protects consumers from unwittingly reaffirming a discharged debt and leaves the same consumer unprotected when reaffirming an expired one.
What the deadline does, and what it does not do
Iowa bars the remedy rather than the debt. Section 614.1 says actions “may be brought within the times limited… and not afterwards,” which addresses the action. The word “extinguish” appears in chapter 614 only in the marketable record title provisions governing real property, never for a contract debt. Section 614.12 proves the point: a claim barred by chapter 614 may still be pleaded defensively as a counterclaim, though “no judgment thereon, except for costs, can be rendered in favor of the party so pleading it.” The obligation survives; only affirmative enforcement dies.
The one place the Iowa Code acknowledges that a debt can go unenforceable by limitations is § 524.904(1)(g), a state bank lending-limit provision, which excludes from a bank’s charged-off loans any that are “no longer legally enforceable because of expiration of the statute of limitations.” It has no consumer-facing effect, but it confirms the concept exists in Iowa law.
How often Iowa consumers report collection problems
Iowa consumers filed 748 debt collection complaints with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the 12 months ending August 26, 2026, which is 0.2% of the 323,584 filed nationwide and ranks 37th among reporting states.
Of those, 122, or 16% of the Iowa total, were categorized as a collector taking or threatening to take negative or legal action, against 25% nationally.
These are raw complaint counts, not rates. They are not adjusted for population, and a complaint is an allegation the CFPB has published, not a finding that a company broke the law. The figures refresh weekly from the CFPB’s public database.
If you are sued on a debt you believe is too old
Rule 1.419 of the Iowa Rules of Civil Procedure requires special pleading of any defense “which admits the facts of the adverse pleading but seeks to avoid their legal effect.” The rule does not use the phrase “statute of limitations” anywhere, and that phrase appears in the civil rules only at Rule 1.277 on class actions. The limitations defense reaches Rule 1.419 through the catch-all clause rather than by name. Rule 1.421(1) then requires every defense to be asserted in the responsive pleading, in an amendment within 20 days, or at trial where no responsive pleading is required.
Rule 1.420 deserves attention in a card debt case, because it cuts both ways. A pleading founded on an account must contain “a bill of particulars thereof, by consecutively numbered items, which shall define and limit the proof.” That forces an itemized account from the plaintiff. But the same rule provides that a pleading controverting the account “must specify the items denied, and any items not thus specified shall be deemed admitted.” A general denial is not enough in Iowa. Court deadlines are unforgiving, so this is a point at which speaking with an Iowa attorney or a legal aid organization is worth the call.
How Iowa compares
The same question gets a different answer a state line away. These are the closest comparisons to Iowa:
- West Virginia: ten years on a writing, and the code is silent on payment
- Illinois: the other long written period
- Pennsylvania: no statute addresses what a payment does
The full comparison table covers every state we have published.
Sources and verification
Statutes quoted from the Code of Iowa 2026, official PDF edition, published by the Legislative Services Agency under Iowa Code chapter 2B. Provisions cited: §§ 614.1 through 614.13, particularly § 614.1, § 614.3, § 614.5, § 614.11, and § 614.12; §§ 554.2725, 554.3118, and 554.4111; § 537.7103 with §§ 537.7102 and 537.5108; § 524.904; and §§ 2B.12 and 2B.17 on publication. Rules 1.419, 1.420, 1.421, and 1.277 from the Iowa Court Rules chapter 1 as published by the Legislature. The 2026 edition states that it includes “all enactments with a January 1, 2026, or earlier effective date from the 2025 Regular Session of the Ninety-first Iowa General Assembly.” Iowa has published a single annual edition rather than a supplement since 2011, per § 2B.17(2)(b), so there is no separate supplement to check. Text retrieved August 26, 2026. Complaint data: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, filtered to the Debt collection product and the Iowa state field over a rolling 12-month window, re-queried weekly by this site. Our data sources and update policy lists every figure on this site that refreshes automatically and how often.
A note on method. The Legislature’s own code search endpoint returned site navigation rather than results in our testing, so we did not rely on it. We built the corpus from Iowa’s eight official volume PDFs, confirmed it was searchable with control probes against text we had already located by hand, and established every negative finding on this page against that full-code corpus.
This page explains what the Iowa statutes say. It is general information, not legal advice, and it does not resolve whether a particular credit card account is written, unwritten, or an open account under chapter 614, because the chapter does not address credit cards at all.
Frequently asked questions
How long can a debt collector pursue an old debt in Iowa?
The deadline to sue is ten years on a written contract under Iowa Code § 614.1(5)(a) and five years on an unwritten contract under § 614.1(4), which also serves as the catch-all for actions not otherwise provided for. A judgment of a court of record runs twenty years under § 614.1(6).
What is the Iowa statute of limitations on an open account?
Iowa Code § 614.5 is titled “Open account” but sets no limitations period. It provides only that the cause of action “shall be deemed to have accrued on the date of the last item therein, as proved on the trial.” The length still comes from § 614.1(4) or § 614.1(5), and the code does not say which applies to an open account.
Does making a payment restart the statute of limitations in Iowa?
The code does not say. Section 614.11 revives a contract claim only by “an admission in writing, signed by the party to be charged, that the debt is unpaid, or by a like new promise to pay the same.” Partial payment is not mentioned in § 614.11 or anywhere else in the Iowa Code, and a bare payment is neither signed nor a writing.
Can a collector sue me on an expired debt in Iowa?
The Iowa Code does not prohibit it. Section 537.7103, the prohibited practices section of the Iowa Debt Collection Practices Act, contains no reference to a debt’s age or to the expiration of a limitations period, and no Iowa statute requires disclosing that a debt is too old to sue on. The limitations period is a defense you must raise, not a bar on filing.