How to read your credit report

Where to get it without paying

The Fair Credit Reporting Act entitles you to free copies of your credit report from each of the three nationwide bureaus. The federally authorised source is annualcreditreport.com — the bureaus each run their own marketing sites as well, and those are not the same thing.

Pull all three. The bureaus do not share data with each other, so a furnisher may report to one, two, or all three, and an error on one report frequently does not appear on the others. A difference between two reports for the same account is itself worth looking at.

Part one — identifying information

Your name, current and former addresses, date of birth, and employers. This section does not affect your score, but it is worth reading first, because it is how mixed files happen: an address or a name variant you do not recognise can be the reason someone else’s account is attached to your report.

Part two — accounts, also called tradelines

This is most of the report and most of the score. Each tradeline is one account and carries the furnisher’s name, the account type, the date opened, the credit limit or original amount, the current balance, the payment status, and a month-by-month payment history.

The field that governs how long a negative item can stay is the date of first delinquency — the date the account first went late and never came current again. It is not the date the account closed, not the date it was sold to a collector, and not the date the collector started reporting. Most negative information comes off roughly seven years from that date. A collection account that has been sold several times does not get a fresh clock with each sale.

• Date opened — when the account began.
• Date of first delinquency — when the clock on a negative item started.
• Date of last activity — often misunderstood; it does not restart the reporting period.
• Payment status — the current state of the account.
• Payment history — the month-by-month grid.

Part three — inquiries

A hard inquiry is recorded when you apply for credit and a lender pulls your file. A soft inquiry — your own check, a pre-screened offer, an existing creditor reviewing your account — is visible to you but is not part of the scoring calculation and is not something to dispute as though it were.

Hard inquiries you do not recognise are worth attention, because they can be the first visible sign of an application someone else made in your name.

Part four — public records and collections

Bankruptcies appear here. Most other court records were removed from the nationwide reports years ago under an industry data-quality agreement, so this section is usually short.

Collections may appear as their own tradelines. A single debt can legitimately appear twice — once as the original account and once as the collection — but the original should show a zero balance if the debt was sold. The same balance owed in two places is the kind of discrepancy worth examining.

What is disputable and what is not

The dispute process exists for information that is inaccurate, that the furnisher cannot verify, or that is past the period it may be reported. It does not exist for information that is accurate, current, and unflattering. A late payment you actually made late is not an error, and no process removes it before its time.

This is not legal advice, and it is a description of how the reporting system works rather than guidance about your particular file.