Effect of Late Credit Card Payments on Credit Score

ANY late payment (received after the due date) affects your credit score.  The amount it affects it depends on the rest of your credit picture.  If it is a one-time occurance it may not make as much of a difference as if you had problems a few years ago – it may “look” to the computer programs that generate credit scores as if there is a possibility that past problems are possibly happening again. 

It also may depend on how high the balance is as a % of the limit on that credit card and others that you have open.  The higher the balance(s) the bigger the impact it may have on your credit. 

In general it is hard to know how much one incident may affect the credit score because there are a lot of factors that go into it.  On the other hand, one or two incorrect reports may make a very large difference.  I had a customer this spring that had 2 incorrectly reported collections on his credit.  Once those were corrected his score went up 80 points.