Your Right to Dispute a Credit Card Charge

You open your credit card statement and there it is: a charge for a hotel stay you canceled, a “free trial” that turned into $79.99 a month, or a merchant name you’ve never seen in your life. Most people’s first move is to call the company and hope. What many never learn is that a 1974 federal law, the Fair Credit Billing Act, gives you specific, enforceable rights here, with deadlines that cut both ways.

Used correctly, those rights mean you can refuse to pay a disputed charge while it’s investigated, the card company must respond on a fixed schedule, and your liability for a stolen card number is capped at pocket change. Used incorrectly, or too late, you can forfeit the law’s protection entirely. Here is how the machinery actually works.

What counts as a billing error

The law covers more than fraud. Under the federal rule implementing the Act, Regulation Z’s billing-error provisions, you can dispute charges that are unauthorized, charges in the wrong amount, charges for goods or services you never received or didn’t accept, charges for items not delivered as agreed, math errors on the statement, payments that weren’t credited, and statements the issuer failed to send to your current address after proper notice.

Two things it does not cover: ordinary buyer’s remorse, and quality complaints, though a separate FCBA provision can sometimes help when goods are defective and you first try in good faith to resolve it with the merchant. For “I never got what I paid for” situations, the Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on being billed for things you never received walks through that territory.

The 60-day clock, and how not to blow it

Here is the deadline that matters most: your written dispute must reach the issuer no later than 60 days after it sent the first statement showing the error. Not 60 days from when you noticed it, and not from the transaction date. If the charge appeared on your March statement and you didn’t open the envelope until June, the FCBA window has likely closed. This is the strongest practical argument for at least skimming every statement, every month.

To preserve your full legal rights, the dispute should be in writing, sent to the issuer’s address for billing inquiries, which is different from the payment address and is printed on your statement. Many issuers now accept disputes by phone or through their app, and often that works fine, but the FTC’s guidance on disputing credit card charges notes that the written route is what triggers the statute’s protections. Include your name, account number, the charge you’re disputing, the amount, and why you believe it’s wrong. Keep a copy.

What the card company must do, on a schedule

Once your dispute lands, the issuer is on the clock. It must acknowledge your complaint in writing within 30 days, and it must resolve the dispute within two complete billing cycles, and never more than 90 days, after receiving it.

While the investigation runs, the law tilts the table your way:

• You may withhold payment on the disputed amount, including related finance charges. You must still pay the rest of your bill.
• The issuer can’t collect on the disputed amount, sue you over it, or close your account for refusing to pay it during the investigation.
• It can’t report you as delinquent on the disputed amount to the credit bureaus while the dispute is pending.

If the issuer finds you’re right, the charge and any related interest and fees come off the account. If it decides the bill was correct, it must tell you in writing why, and you’re entitled to copies of the documents it relied on if you ask. You then owe the amount, plus the finance charges that accrued, and you typically get a short window to pay before late fees begin.

The $50 rule for stolen cards and numbers

Unauthorized use gets its own, even friendlier standard. Under federal law, your maximum liability for unauthorized charges on a credit card is $50, and if only the card number was stolen, not the physical card, you owe nothing. In practice, the major networks’ zero-liability policies mean issuers almost never collect even the $50. Report a lost or stolen card immediately anyway; speed is what keeps the paper trail clean.

Note that these are credit card rules. Debit cards fall under a different law with weaker, time-sensitive caps, one more reason many consumer lawyers suggest using credit, not debit, for online purchases.

A clean dispute, step by step

• 1. Try the merchant first, briefly. Many billing mistakes die with one email, and card issuers often ask whether you tried. Don’t let this step eat your 60 days.
• 2. Send the written dispute to the billing-inquiries address within the window. Certified mail with return receipt is cheap insurance for a large amount.
• 3. Pay the undisputed balance on time, so nothing else on the account goes delinquent.
• 4. Save everything: receipts, cancellation confirmations, screenshots, names and dates from phone calls.
• 5. Escalate if the issuer stonewalls. You can submit a complaint to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which forwards it to the company and generally gets a documented response. Issuers that violate the FCBA’s procedures can forfeit the right to collect the disputed amount, up to $50 per charge, even if the bill was otherwise correct.

The pattern to remember: the law rewards people who read their statements, write things down, and act inside the window. Sixty days goes by faster than you think.

This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.