diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index e3cd5a1c63..a225df8428 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -124,6 +124,7 @@
  * Restore resumable hints delivery (CASSANDRA-11960)
  * Properly report LWT contention (CASSANDRA-12626)
 Merged from 3.0:
+ * Estimated TS drop-time histogram updated with Cell.NO_DELETION_TIME (CASSANDRA-13040)
  * Nodetool compactionstats fails with NullPointerException (CASSANDRA-13021)
  * Thread local pools never cleaned up (CASSANDRA-13033)
  * Set RPC_READY to false when draining or if a node is marked as shutdown (CASSANDRA-12781)
diff --git a/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/io/sstable/metadata/MetadataCollector.java b/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/io/sstable/metadata/MetadataCollector.java
index 730f9f033b..3b32ae2c7c 100644
--- a/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/io/sstable/metadata/MetadataCollector.java
+++ b/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/io/sstable/metadata/MetadataCollector.java
@@ -205,7 +205,8 @@ public class MetadataCollector implements PartitionStatisticsCollector
     private void updateLocalDeletionTime(int newLocalDeletionTime)
     {
         localDeletionTimeTracker.update(newLocalDeletionTime);
-        estimatedTombstoneDropTime.update(newLocalDeletionTime);
+        if (newLocalDeletionTime != Cell.NO_DELETION_TIME)
+            estimatedTombstoneDropTime.update(newLocalDeletionTime);
     }
 
     private void updateTTL(int newTTL)