Is Balanced Healthcare Receivables Legit? What to Know Before You Pay

Yes, Balanced Healthcare Receivables is a legitimate debt collection agency. They are Balanced Healthcare Receivables, LLC, a third-party collector of medical bills based at 164 Burke Street in Nashua, New Hampshire, and if they are calling or writing to you, a hospital, doctor, lab or other healthcare provider has placed an unpaid balance in your name with them for collection.

Legitimate is not the same thing as correct. Medical bills go wrong in predictable ways: the insurer may still be processing the claim, the provider may have billed the wrong person, or the balance may already have been paid. Those are exactly the problems consumers report to federal regulators about this company. This article covers who they are, which of their phone numbers can be verified, what the federal complaint record shows, how medical debt is treated on credit reports today, and the steps that protect you. Agruss Law Firm has helped thousands of consumers stop debt collection harassment, and consumers never pay us for that work.

Who is Balanced Healthcare Receivables?

Balanced Healthcare Receivables, LLC, often shortened to BHR, is a New Hampshire limited liability company whose principal place of business is 164 Burke Street, Suite 201, Nashua, NH 03060. That address comes from the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation’s own 2025 order against them, and it matches both the Better Business Bureau profile and the Google business listing. The BBB records their business start date as 29 January 2007.

They describe themselves as a third-party, healthcare-specific debt collection agency, and their website carries the standard notice that the communication is from a debt collector. That distinction decides your rights. A hospital collecting their own bill sits largely outside the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, but an agency collecting somebody else’s bill is a third-party debt collector and is covered by all of it.

Sources: bhrllc.com contact page, the BBB business profile for Balanced Healthcare Receivables and the California DFPI enforcement record, all retrieved 15 September 2026.

Older versions of this page said BHR was not BBB accredited and had 12 BBB complaints in three years. Both statements are out of date: they have been accredited since September 2015, and the BBB now lists 28 complaints in the last three years. Earlier versions also repeated an employee count and a claim about lawsuits against the company that we could not verify, and both have been removed.

Phone numbers you can verify

Four numbers can be tied to Balanced Healthcare Receivables through a primary source. The two 603 numbers carry New Hampshire’s area code, which fits a company based in Nashua.

Sources: bhrllc.com contact page and the BBB business profile, retrieved 15 September 2026.

If a caller says they are from BHR and the number is not on this list, do not give payment details on that call. Anyone can claim to be calling from a real company. Hang up, find the reference number on any letter you received, and call 866-460-2471, the number on their own website. Calling back through a number you looked up yourself is the quickest way to tell a real collector from someone borrowing their name.

Why is Balanced Healthcare Receivables contacting you?

Because a healthcare provider referred an unpaid balance in your name to them. In the CFPB data, 68 of the 78 debt collection complaints filed against BHR since January 2021 concern medical debt, nine are marked “I do not know”, and one concerns a credit card. The bill could come from any provider you have seen, which is why the name on the call is so often one you have never heard of. For the general picture of why debt collectors call, see our guide; for a medical bill specifically, check three things before you pay anything.

1. Did your insurance pay? Call your insurer and ask for the explanation of benefits for that date of service. Bills that reach collections while a claim is still in process, or after it was paid, are a recurring medical debt problem. Across the whole CFPB database, 12.7% of medical debt collection complaints say the debt had already been paid, nearly three times the 4.4% share across all debt collection complaints.
2. Is the amount right? Ask the provider, not the collector, for an itemized bill. Duplicate charges and charges for services you did not receive are easier to spot line by line than on a single balance.
3. Did a nonprofit hospital send the bill? Tax-exempt hospitals must have a written financial assistance policy. Under the IRS’s section 501(r)(6) billing and collection rules, the hospital generally cannot take “extraordinary collection actions”, which include reporting you to a credit bureau, selling your debt or taking legal action, until at least 120 days after the first post-discharge bill, and they must consider a complete financial assistance application you submit within 240 days. Ask the hospital, in writing, for their financial assistance policy and an application.

What the federal complaint record says

The CFPB Consumer Complaint Database is the most useful public record on any collection agency, because companies must respond and the responses are published. Balanced Healthcare Receivables has 121 complaints on file, the first received in 2013. Since 1 January 2021 there are 80, and 78 of those are debt collection complaints. The most recent was received on 31 July 2026.

Those are small numbers next to the largest national collectors, and it would be wrong to call BHR an outlier on volume. The trend is the story.

Complaints have more than tripled since 2020, and the partial 2026 total already exceeds every full year. Source: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, company “BALANCED HEALTHCARE RECEIVABLES, LLC”, retrieved 15 September 2026.

What people complain about

BHR collects almost nothing but medical bills, so the fair comparison is against other medical debt collection complaints rather than against debt collection as a whole. Measured that way, three categories stand out, and all three are about how a collector makes contact rather than about the debt itself.

Share of debt collection complaints by category. Source: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, complaints received 1 January 2021 to 15 September 2026, retrieved 15 September 2026. The national baseline is the 48,562 debt collection complaints with the sub-product “Medical debt”.

• Talking to a third party about your debt: 6 of 78 complaints, 7.7%, against 1.1% nationally, about seven times the rate. With a medical bill this is especially sensitive, because the debt can reveal that you received care.
• Frequent or repeated texts or emails: 4 complaints, 5.1%, against 0.8%, about six times the rate.
• Frequent or repeated calls: 8 complaints, 10.3%, against 3.2%, about three times the rate.

Consumers also report the debt had already been paid (16.7% against 12.7%) and that the amount was wrong (14.1% against 9.0%) somewhat more often than for medical collectors generally. Two categories run the other way. Only one complaint, 1.3%, involves BHR threatening to sue or damage the consumer’s credit, against 7.1% nationally, and complaints about the written notice run at 14.1% against 27.1%. Keep the sample in view: at 78 complaints, one complaint moves a share by about 1.3 points. These are signals worth knowing, not proof about any individual call.

How complaints end

CFPB debt collection complaints received 1 January 2021 to 15 September 2026. National figures cover 48,562 medical debt collection complaints; the remaining 1.8% were untimely or still in progress. Source: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database.

The single complaint that produced relief was received in November 2022. BHR answered 74 of the 78 on time, 94.9%, a little below the 97.1% rate across all debt collection complaints. A CFPB complaint is still worth filing, because the public record is how articles like this one get written, but against this company it has rarely changed the outcome for the consumer who filed it. A claim under the FDCPA is the mechanism with teeth.

Where the complaints come from is also striking. 24 of the 78, or 30.8%, come from Florida residents, against Florida’s 11.3% share of debt collection complaints nationally. New York follows with 11, then Massachusetts with 6 and Oregon with 5. That concentration is why this article has a Florida section below.

The California penalty, in plain terms

On 1 April 2025, California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation issued a desist and refrain order against Balanced Healthcare Receivables, LLC under their California debt collector license, number 10236-99, and assessed a $5,000 penalty. The reason was specific. Licensed collectors must file an annual report with the Department by 15 March, and the order found BHR filed theirs on or around 24 March 2025, six days after the Department sent them a formal notice of failure to file. BHR asked to resolve the matter without a hearing, and in a settlement agreement signed on 30 April 2025 they agreed to pay a $4,500 administrative penalty and accepted the order as final.

The order is about a missed regulatory filing. It makes no allegation about how BHR treated any consumer, and it should not be read as one. It is still useful: it independently confirms their legal name, their New Hampshire registration, their Nashua address and their California license number, and it names their chief executive, Brent Rice, as the person who signed for the company.

Why an A+ rating and this complaint record can both be true

BHR holds an A+ from the Better Business Bureau and has been accredited since September 2015, and their Google business listing shows 4.7 stars across 735 reviews. None of that contradicts the CFPB file. A BBB grade is based partly on how a business answers complaints brought through the BBB, and a star average reflects who chooses to leave a review. Neither measures whether the call you received was lawful, or whether the balance you are being asked to pay is right.

What Balanced Healthcare Receivables is not allowed to do

Each complaint category above maps onto a specific restriction in federal law.

Statutory text verified against the Cornell Legal Information Institute editions of 15 U.S.C. § 1692c, § 1692d, § 1692e, § 1692f, § 1692g and 12 C.F.R. § 1006.14.

The seven-in-seven rule is a presumption, not a hard cap. A collector who stays at or below seven calls in seven consecutive days about a particular debt is presumed to comply, one who goes above is presumed to violate the law, and a further call within seven days of an actual phone conversation about that debt also breaks the presumption. Our guide to how many times a debt collector can call you walks through it.

If the contact is coming by text message or automated call, a second statute may apply. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act carries damages of $500 per call or text, up to $1,500 where the violation is willful or knowing, separate from anything you may recover under the FDCPA. We handle those claims as well, including unwanted text messages and robocalls.

Medical debt and your credit report

This is where medical debt differs most from other collections, and where the rules have moved most in the last four years.

Sources: the joint Equifax, Experian and TransUnion announcement of 11 April 2023, the CFPB’s May 2023 consumer notice, the National Consumer Law Center’s case summary, and the Cornell editions of 12 C.F.R. § 1006.30 and 15 U.S.C. § 1681c.

The first three rows are policies the three bureaus adopted themselves, not law, and the July 2025 court decision did not touch them; as of September 2026 we have found no announcement from any of the three withdrawing them. The CFPB rule that would have gone further was published in January 2025, and the court vacated the rule after the CFPB itself asked for that in April 2025. The National Consumer Law Center notes that about fifteen states have their own restrictions on medical debt reporting, which the Texas decision does not directly affect.

So if a BHR collection that is under $500, already paid, or less than a year old appears on your report, that is a credit report error, and you can dispute it with the credit bureaus. Pull all three reports free at AnnualCreditReport.com, the only federally authorized source, and see our guide to getting your free credit report. If the account is not yours at all, note that three of the complaints against BHR since 2021 describe debts that resulted from identity theft. Reporting problems that survive a dispute are what our FCRA lawyers handle.

The seven-year reporting limit is not the same as a deadline to sue. A debt can drop off your report and still be collectible, or stop being suable while it is still on your report, depending on your state. Our statute of limitations on debt by state table covers the second question, and if you have already been served, read can a debt collector sue you before your answer deadline passes.

If you live in Florida

Nearly a third of the complaints against BHR since 2021 come from Florida, and Florida gives consumers a second statute on top of the federal one. The Florida Consumer Collection Practices Act, section 559.72 of the Florida Statutes, opens with the words “In collecting consumer debts, a person may not”. That reaches anyone collecting a consumer debt, including a hospital or physician practice collecting their own bill, not only third-party agencies like BHR.

Source: Fla. Stat. § 559.72 and § 559.77, 2025 Florida Statutes, Florida Senate.

Under Fla. Stat. § 559.77(2), a violation carries actual damages, additional statutory damages of up to $1,000, court costs and reasonable attorney’s fees, and the court may also award punitive damages. The deadline is two years from the violation under § 559.77(4), twice the one-year limit for a federal FDCPA claim under 15 U.S.C. § 1692k(d).

What to do if Balanced Healthcare Receivables contacts you

These steps work in order, and the third one is time-limited.

1. Do not pay or confirm anything on the first call. Ask for the provider’s name, the date of service, the amount and the reference number, then end the call politely.
2. Check the bill with the provider and your insurer. Ask the insurer whether the claim was paid or is still in process, and ask the provider for an itemized bill and, if they are a nonprofit hospital, their financial assistance application.
3. Dispute in writing within 30 days. Under 15 U.S.C. § 1692g, BHR must send you a written notice within five days of first contacting you, and you then have 30 days from receiving it to dispute in writing. Do that and they must stop collecting until they mail you verification. Their website offers an online dispute form, which they say marks the account as disputed in their office without automatically resolving it with the provider. Also send a letter to the address on their notice, or to 164 Burke Street, Suite 201, Nashua, NH 03060, and keep proof of mailing.
4. Send a written stop-contact letter if you want the calls to end. Section 1692c(c) requires them to stop communicating once you put that request in writing. Understand the trade-off: this ends the calls but does not cancel the debt or prevent a lawsuit, so dispute first if you want the bill itself examined.
5. Write down every contact. Date, time, the number that appeared, what was said, and who else heard it. Third-party contact and repeated calls are proved with call logs, screenshots and saved voicemails.
6. Check your credit reports. Look specifically for medical collections under $500, paid ones, or ones less than a year old, and dispute any that appear.
7. Talk to a lawyer before you pay a balance you dispute or sign a payment plan. Paying part of a debt can have consequences for older accounts in some states, and a payment plan is harder to unwind than a dispute.

What it costs to work with us

Nothing, and that is how the statute is built. The FDCPA is a fee-shifting statute: 15 U.S.C. § 1692k lets a consumer who wins recover actual damages, additional statutory damages of up to $1,000, and the costs of the action together with a reasonable attorney’s fee. That means the collector pays our fees and costs, not you.

Your case evaluation is free, and you pay no fee unless you win. If you are dealing with several medical collectors at once, or you are not sure which of them the statute covers, our debt help page is the place to start.

Past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case.

Frequently asked questions

This article is general legal information, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Complaint counts and company details were verified on 15 September 2026 and may change.