The other thing worth separating out early is the public register. Whether your trust deed appears on the Register of Insolvencies is a different question with a different answer and a shorter clock.

Here is where the six years comes from, where the agencies disagree, and how the entry reaches your file at all. What a protected trust deed is covers the solution itself.

The Scottish sources date it from the start of the deed rather than from your discharge. On a four-year deed that means the record usually clears around two years after you are discharged.

Three sources, one number

mygov.scot’s page on how a trust deed could affect you says your credit rating will be negatively affected for six years from when the trust deed begins.

The Accountant in Bankruptcy’s protected trust deed information document says the record remains on your credit report for six years, without naming a start point. National Debtline Scotland gives six years too.

But the agencies do not describe the same start point

Experian’s published retention schedule puts insolvency at six years from the start date, or until the stated end date, whichever is latest. That last clause can push the entry past six years on a deed that ran long.

Equifax’s schedule dates the six years for a discharged record from the court date. Those are not the same rule as mygov.scot’s, and this page is not going to pick one for you.

So plan on six years from the day you signed, and check your own file rather than a diary. The date that matters is the one your file actually carries.

A four-year deed, clock by clock

None of them. No statute, no statutory instrument and no Financial Conduct Authority rule sets a six-year retention period for credit file data anywhere in the United Kingdom.

What the law does say

The only legal control is the storage limitation principle in Article 5(1)(e) of the UK GDPR, which says personal data must not be kept in identifiable form for longer than is necessary for the purposes it is processed for.

That is a ceiling, not a period. It also carries an exception where data will be processed solely for statistical purposes, and that exception is why one agency holds eleven years while using only six.

Who does set it, then

Lenders share data with the agencies under an industry agreement called the Principles of Reciprocity. Since 31 May 2026 those Principles have been owned and administered by the Credit Information Governance Body, which replaced the Steering Committee on Reciprocity.

Any page still explaining the six years by reference to SCOR is describing a body that no longer exists. The Principles themselves are not openly published, so nobody should be quoting them at you either.

And the regulator has never set it

The Information Commissioner’s Office credit guidance for the public reports six-year periods as fact but cites no legal source for any of them. It grounds itself in data protection law generally, which is exactly the ceiling above.

No, and their own published schedules prove it. They agree on roughly six years for live lending decisions and disagree on almost everything else, including how long the data is held after that.

The three schedules side by side

Those are the agencies’ own words, from Experian’s, Equifax’s and TransUnion’s published retention pages.

The joint rulebook declines to set one figure

The three publish a joint transparency notice called CRAIN, the Credit Reference Agency Information Notice. It says each of them may retain data for different periods of time, and that those periods are reviewed and may change.

That is an industry document, not a regulation. It is quoted here because it is the agencies’ own account of what they do.

What that means for you

• Check all three, because the entry can look different on each.
• Do not assume a date because a website gave you one. Read what your own file says.

Six years is a sound planning assumption and a poor guarantee. How long debt information stays on your credit file sets out the other entries and their own clocks.

Through a daily data feed out of the public register. The Accountant in Bankruptcy runs a commercial daily data download from the Register of Insolvencies, and the main credit reference agencies subscribe to it.

The chain, and it is checkable at both ends

AiB says it in its own notes for guidance on the Register of Insolvencies, last updated 1 July 2026. The register has a free search facility, and a commercial daily data download service is subscribed to by the main credit reference agencies.

The agencies confirm it from their end. CRAIN names the Accountant in Bankruptcy among its sources of insolvency data, alongside the Insolvency Service and the Edinburgh, London and Belfast Gazettes.

So the route is register, feed, file. It is not your trustee reporting you, and it is not your creditors.

Your individual accounts are a separate feed

Lenders report account status data to the agencies as a matter of course, so a creditor whose account is inside the deed will normally report it. That follows from CRAIN’s description of lender-supplied data rather than from a rule.

Those entries run on their own dates. That is why a default recorded before you signed clears on its own timetable.

No, and neither one sets the other. The register entry comes off about a year after the deed completes, while the credit file entry runs for six years from the start, and the two periods are unrelated.

The myth in one line

A page telling you the entry stays on your file for six years because that is how long it sits on the register is simply wrong. Section 200 of the Bankruptcy (Scotland) Act 2016 sets no deletion rule at all, and neither does the prescribed form of the register.

What the register does have is AiB’s operating practice, and AiB says so in its own words. The information document gives the deed’s duration plus 12 months after completion.

The two records compared

The register is the one anyone can search, and will your trust deed appear on the Register of Insolvencies covers what it shows and who looks.

Council tax arrears and a wage arrestment. Neither reaches a credit file, because there is no mechanism by which either could get there.

Why not

Credit files are built from data supplied by lenders, from three public registers and from the electoral roll. A council appears on the agencies’ published source list once, as the supplier of the electoral register, and for nothing else.

A summary warrant is not a decree in any of the four sheriff court procedures Registry Trust records, so there is nothing for it to pass on. A wage arrestment is not registered anywhere at all.

What can still show up

• A missed payment on a credit account, where an arrestment or a frozen balance made a direct debit fail. Those are reported by the lender.
• A hard search footprint, if you applied for credit to cover the shortfall.

So the arrestment is invisible and its consequences are not. How to rebuild your credit after council tax arrears deals with that specific pattern.

Make sure it is accurate, and let time do the rest. Nothing lawful removes a correctly recorded trust deed before the agencies’ retention period ends.

The four checks worth making

• Every account included in the deed shows settled or closed rather than an open balance.
• The trust deed entry carries the right start date, because that date sets when it drops off.
• No account included in the deed is still recording new arrears after your discharge date.
• You are on the electoral register at your current address.

Where something is wrong, raise it with the agency and with the lender that supplied the data. How to rebuild your credit score after a trust deed sets out the statutory correction route in full.

Nobody can shorten an accurate entry

Firms selling credit repair cannot remove a true record, whatever the advertising says. If you are planning around a purchase, getting a mortgage after a trust deed covers what the timing actually looks like.

Free advice on any of this is available from Citizens Advice Scotland, StepChange and National Debtline. Whether to use a free debt charity or a paid debt adviser covers that choice, and our trust deed page sets out how we help.