If a County Court Judgment is paid in full within one calendar month of the date of the judgment, it will not appear on the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines, which is the register that credit reference agencies use to record CCJs.
The key date is the date of the judgment itself, not the date you receive notice of it. This is an important distinction because there can sometimes be a delay between the judgment being entered and the paperwork reaching you, particularly if a default judgment has been made without a hearing. This can eat into your one-month window.
If you pay after the one-month period, the CCJ will still appear on the Register but it will be marked as "satisfied" once you apply to have it updated. A satisfied CCJ is better than an unsatisfied one, but it still remains visible on the Register for six years from the date of the judgment and will still affect your credit rating during that time.
Practical points:
1. If you are within the one-month window, pay the full amount as quickly as possible and make sure you can prove payment, for example by bank transfer rather than cash.
2. If a default judgment has been entered and you only just found out about it, check the date of the judgment immediately. If you are still within the month, prioritise payment above all else.
3. If the one-month deadline has passed, you can still apply to have the judgment set aside under CPR Part 13 if you have a real prospect of successfully defending the claim, or if there is some other good reason why it should be set aside. This is a separate question from simply paying it.
4. If you have already paid in full after the one-month period, you can apply to have the entry on the Register marked as satisfied by filing a certificate of satisfaction at the court. There is a small fee for this.
5. If you believe the judgment was entered wrongly, for example because you were never properly served with the claim, that may give you grounds to apply to set it aside, which if successful would remove the entry from the Register entirely.
The one-month rule comes from the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines Regulations 2005, specifically regulation 12.
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