<p>Personal insolvency regimes often require consumer debtors to complete a multi-year repayment plan before obtaining a discharge, yet empirical evidence on how plan duration relates to realised repayment remains scarce. This article provides exploratory evidence from the Belgian collective debt settlement procedure, a judicial procedure for structurally over-indebted consumers in which amicable repayment plans may last up to seven years. Drawing on a manually reconstructed file-level dataset from one Belgian labour-court division (Ghent) (<i>n</i> = 118; plans terminated 2020–2024), the study examines how plan duration is associated with plan performance, measured by the effective repayment percentage (recovery rate). The results reveal substantial heterogeneity, with clusters near both 0% and full repayment. Average recovery is 48.5% across all plans and 67.3% among completed plans. Bivariate patterns are sensitive to early terminations, but once irregular terminations are excluded, longer plans are associated with lower recovery. Tobit models confirm that, among completed plans, each additional year of duration is associated with a decline of roughly 4.8 percentage points in recovery, controlling for debt burden, employment income, asset sales, and age. Additional analyses suggest that longer plans coincide with lower income, higher debt burdens, and a larger share of distributions absorbed by mediator fees. The findings do not establish causality, but they suggest that, in the subsample of completed plans, longer plans are associated with weaker repayment outcomes and support a more differentiated debate on plan duration and debt discharge design in consumer insolvency.</p>