How many years does it take before student loans do not have to be repaid?

The answer to your question could depend on several things. Namely, your ethics. If you don't have any problem never paying back a debt, depending on what state you live in and what kind of debt it is, you may never 'have to repay' the loan. This doesn't necessarily mean that the debtor can't come repossess the object(s) that you borrowed money from them to get those items! But if it's a credit card debt, they may not have any legal recourse except to report it to credit agencies. This will always be on your credit report. For life. A company can go back as far as they want on your credit history. Most go back 7 years. If your buying a house, they go back a lot further! From an accounting point of view, the debtor (Debtor A) will try to collect on a debt for a certain specified amount of time. I don't know what determines this amount of time. Probably customer history, credit history, income status, ect. Once this time elapses, Debtor A will sell the your dept, a note recievable, to another company, Debtor B at a reduced value. The original company will write off the money for the original amount of the loan on their taxes as a 'bad debt'. That doesn't mean you don't still owe that money to someone. You now owe it to the second company. This may or may not be the collection agency that works in conjunction with the original debtor. Either way, what the second debtor isn't going to tell you, the debtee, is they will probably be willing to settle for less than less than the original amount of the debt. The reason for this is that they incurred the debt for less than the face value of the note. Legally, you owe Debtor B, the face value of the note until they give up on collecting from you. At this point, they will either sell the note for less than they paid for it to a 3rd debtor, or they will just write off on their taxes. You won't know until you just quit hearing from someone about your bad debt. This could take litterally years! Your debt could be sold to several debtors before its finall written off for good. Each debtor is most likely going to report you to atleast one of the credit agencies. No matter what you do, your credit will be marred for life. And don't be fooled by these credit card offers that you might get in the mail saying you have great credit! They target people who do this kind of thing and can't get credit any other way. These kind of people are forced to pay ridiculous interest fees, over the limit fees, membership fees, the list goes on!