Looking to change gamertag - It's taken by a 10 year old account

Afraid not.Gamertags are used on other services,not just xbox live so you can't know for sure whether the tag is being used or not.

If a tag does not sign in after 5 years then it gets released but this was only introduced a couple of months ago.

It's just a case of keep on checking and maybe it will be freed up one day.

It doesn't become available until 10 years. Gamertags are recycled every 10 years

I'm not sure if you understood my question. I know that inactive Gamertags become available after many years but every source I've looked at says that a Gamertag is released as soon as the account it's connected to does a Gamertag change.

They use the DOB attributed to your account upon creation of your gamertag, if the hotmail age changes your account stays the same.

this was done to prevent 12 year olds making a gamertag and changing their hotmail age to 10 years older to bypass age filters, on behalf of microsoft i apologize for this inconvenience and happy birthday for the next few years until you are old enough.

any disagreement then pics or your birth never happened

kinda same issue here.

so two years ago i deleted my ms account now two years late got a xbox one and created a new account but now i want my old gamertag back so thinking my old account had been deleted i tried to change my gamertag to my old gamertag but got a message that
"that gamertag has already been taken" then i searched about that gamertag and found out that my old account hadnt been deleted yet and then when i tried to log in to my old account it said " there is no account by that email address". so i guess that old
ms account got deleted but not the xbl account as i can still see my old gamertag,acchivement,account description and all.so is there any way to recover that old xbl account or the gamertag now by deleting that old xbl account so that gamertag be available
to put in my new account?

im searching for a solution too.let me know if u find one.

Hello Slay My Soul! The only way to change your gamertags is to Pay the 800 MS Points for each to change them. If you are wanting your old gamertag you are first going to have to pay to change the old one to be able to use that name for the new one as you
arent able to have two accounts at the same time with the same name spelled the exact same way. Remember if your having problems recovering your old Gamertag, if it has been a long time since you used your old account and it sat for a long time without a Gold
subscription, it was more than likely reset when Microsoft reset old banned and unused gamertags last year and it was probably taken by someone else. If that is the case than you will be unable to use that name.

I do hope this helps!