The notification arrives on a Tuesday: a customer has disputed a charge. You open your Stripe dashboard expecting something recent — last week, maybe last month — and instead find a transaction from ten months ago. Your first reaction is that this must be some kind of error. Surely there's a statute of limitations on disputing a charge you clearly made, received, and used?

There is. It's just much longer than almost every merchant believes.

Most of us carry a vague conviction that chargebacks have to happen within a month or two of the sale. The belief isn't foolish — it descends from a real law — but it's wrong in a way that matters, because it quietly shapes decisions you make every day: how long you keep server logs, when you archive support threads, whether you bother saving the checkout record for an order that shipped fine. So it's worth pinning down precisely. How far back can a customer dispute a charge, and when does the clock actually start?

Where the 60-day myth comes from

The number lodged in most merchants' heads is sixty days, and it comes from the Fair Credit Billing Act, the 1974 US law that gives cardholders the right to contest "billing errors." Under the FCBA, a cardholder must raise the error within 60 days of receiving the statement that contains it.

Here's the catch: the FCBA is a floor, not a ceiling. It's the minimum protection an issuer must offer. The card networks — Visa, Mastercard, and the rest — layer their own dispute rules on top, and those rules are far more generous to the cardholder. Since the chargeback process runs on network rules, not directly on the FCBA, the 60-day figure is real but mostly irrelevant to you. It's the answer to a different question.

The 120-day rule — and when the clock actually starts

Under network rules, most dispute types carry a limit of 120 calendar days. Visa states this explicitly for the bulk of its dispute conditions; Mastercard's timeframes have the same general shape. Four months, give or take. That alone surprises merchants who assumed a dispute in March couldn't touch a charge from the previous November.

But the more consequential detail is when the 120 days begin. It is not always the day you charged the card.

For fraud disputes, the clock generally runs from the transaction processing date — the straightforward case. For disputes about goods or services that never arrived, though, the clock runs from the date the cardholder expected to receive them. Think about what that means in practice. A customer pre-orders a product in January that's slated to ship in June: their dispute window doesn't open until June. Someone buys a ticket in October for a conference next spring: the clock starts at the event, not at checkout. A furniture order with a twelve-week lead time, a coaching package delivered over six months, an annual plan paid up front — in all of these, the money moved long before the countdown began.

The 540-day outer edge

Networks do close the door eventually. For these delayed-delivery and future-services cases, Visa caps the dispute window at 540 days from the transaction processing date — roughly eighteen months — and Mastercard imposes a similar outer bound. That's the true horizon.

So the honest answer to the question has two parts. For an ordinary transaction — charged today, delivered today — the practical limit is about four months. For anything where delivery or performance sits in the future, it stretches as far as eighteen months from the day you were paid.

Subscriptions deserve their own note, because each renewal is its own transaction with its own clock. A customer who decides to dispute "all those charges" can pull in every billing cycle still inside its individual 120-day window — on a monthly plan, that's typically the last four charges arriving as four simultaneous disputes. On an annual plan, a single renewal disputed near the edge of its window means you're defending a charge from an agreement made two years ago.

Why disputes surface so late

It's tempting to read a ten-month-old dispute as bad faith. Usually it's something more mundane: that's simply when the customer looked.

Almost nobody reconciles statements monthly anymore. Statement review is episodic — it happens at tax time, when a budgeting app is set up and dredges a year of transactions into daylight, or when a card is reissued after a fraud scare and every recurring charge suddenly demands re-justification. Late disputes cluster around these audit moments, not around the purchase.

Subscriptions add a second mechanism. Remembering to cancel a plan before it renews is what cognitive psychologists call a prospective memory task — remembering to remember — and prospective memory fails quietly, without any signal that it has failed. The customer formed the intention to cancel eleven months ago; the failure only becomes visible when the renewal posts. From their side, the charge feels like the error.

And then there's ordinary forgetting. Memory for routine purchases decays steeply — the pattern Ebbinghaus documented over a century ago holds for receipts as well as nonsense syllables. A charge that was perfectly legible in the moment becomes, eight months later, a cryptic billing descriptor from a company name the customer never consciously registered. "I didn't make this charge," filed in complete good faith, about a purchase they enjoyed.

Old disputes are asymmetric — and that's the real problem

Here's what makes the long window genuinely dangerous: the customer's right to dispute ages well, and your evidence doesn't.

Eighteen months is enough time for server logs to rotate out on a 90-day retention policy. For the support conversation to be buried in a former employee's archived inbox. For the customer to have deleted their account — possibly via a data-deletion request — taking their usage history with it. The dispute arrives fresh; your defense has been quietly composting.

The practical rule that falls out of the math: keep dispute-relevant records — checkout data, IP and device information, terms acceptance, delivery confirmations, usage logs, customer correspondence — for at least 540 days after the charge. Privacy law is not the obstacle it appears to be here; retaining data necessary to defend against legal claims is a recognized basis under most privacy regimes. Deleting a customer's account doesn't have to mean deleting your dispute file.

One more point worth knowing: the time limit cuts both ways. If a dispute genuinely falls outside the network's window, timeliness is itself a defense. State the processing date, count the days, and say so plainly in your response. It's a rare card to hold, but when you hold it, it tends to win on its own.

The deadline that doesn't stretch

Whatever the age of the charge, one number stays fixed: your window to respond, which Stripe counts in days — often about a week. A dispute over an eighteen-month-old transaction grants you no extra time to reconstruct eighteen-month-old evidence. The clock that took a year and a half to reach you gives you seven days to answer.

That asymmetry is the strongest argument for treating every sale as disputable until it's a year and a half old — and for keeping the file assembled before anyone asks for it. It's also, frankly, why we built Argeback. When a dispute lands, Argeback ingests it from Stripe, gathers the transaction records that still exist, drafts an evidence-backed response matched to the reason code, and files it before the deadline — all from your phone, whether the charge is ten days old or ten months. The network gave your customer 540 days. You get seven. It helps to have something that moves fast on your side: argeback.lumenlabs.works.