Credit Reports and Credit Scores

Get your free credit reports

Order them straight from the official source. Every route is free.

• Get your reports free at AnnualCreditReport.com — every week, permanently, from all three nationwide credit bureaus (the companies that collect your credit history: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion).
• No internet, or you don't want to put your Social Security number in a web form? Call 877-322-8228, or write to Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281. A phone or mail request is mailed to you within 15 days.
• You may be owed an extra free report, beyond the weekly ones, straight from a bureau (not through AnnualCreditReport.com), if: you were denied credit, insurance, employment, or given worse terms because of your report — ask within 60 days of that notice; you are unemployed and plan to apply for work within 60 days; you are on public assistance; or you believe your file has fraud in it.

What your report actually shows

It is a record of how you have handled borrowed money — who you owe, how much, and whether you paid on time. Lenders, landlords, and some employers read it. It is not a measure of you as a person.

• Personal information — your name, address, Social Security number, employment info. Check it for accuracy.
• Accounts — credit cards, loans, mortgages, their limits, balances, and status.
• Public records — bankruptcies only. As of 2018, tax liens and civil judgments were removed from the three nationwide bureaus' reports. That does not make them disappear — they are still public court and county records, and can still turn up in a background check or a specialty report, including one used for a job or a security screening.
• Errors — wrong balances, duplicate accounts, or accounts that were never yours. This is what you are hunting for.

Fix it — the dispute process

You have the right to get wrong information fixed. Free.

What moves your credit score

• Payment history — the single biggest factor in most scoring models. Pay every bill on time.
• How much you owe — a common rule of thumb, which the CFPB repeats, is to keep your balances under about 30% of your credit limits. It is not an official government threshold — lower is generally better.
• A late payment — one payment reported 30 days or more late can hurt your score, and it can sit on your report for seven years.
• Hard inquiries — applying for a lot of credit in a short time can lower your score. But shopping several lenders for one auto loan, one mortgage, or one student loan is different: most scoring models treat multiple inquiries of the same type inside a short shopping window as a single inquiry. Compare rates from more than one lender.
• Closing a card — closing a credit card removes its limit from your total available credit, which can push your utilization up. That is usually what hurts, not the closing itself. If you need to close one, close a newer card with a fee before your oldest account, and pay down balances first.

How long bad marks stay

• Most negative information — late payments, charge-offs, collections — comes off after 7 years.
• A collection account's 7-year clock starts on the date you first fell behind with the original creditor — not the day it was sent to collections, and not the day a debt buyer bought it. If a collector re-ages an old debt by giving it a newer date, that is illegal, and you can dispute it.
• Bankruptcy can stay up to 10 years.
• A lawsuit or judgment can be reported for 7 years, or until the statute of limitations runs out, whichever is longer.
• The 7-year limit does not apply if the report is pulled for a job paying $75,000 or more, or for credit or life insurance of $150,000 or more.
• Medical debt follows the same 7-year rule as any other collection. The three bureaus have voluntarily agreed not to report paid medical collections, to hold unpaid medical collections under $500 off your report, and to wait a year before reporting a new one — but that is company policy, not law, and it can change. A federal rule that would have removed medical debt from credit reports entirely was struck down by a federal court in July 2025 and is not in effect.

Freezes and fraud alerts

• A credit freeze blocks anyone from pulling your credit report to open new credit in your name. It is free to place and free to lift, at all three bureaus, and it does not hurt your score.
• A fraud alert warns a lender to verify your identity before opening credit. An initial one-year alert is free for anyone who suspects fraud.
• Still serving, or in the Guard? Place an active duty alert before you deploy — one year, renewable for the length of your deployment, plus free electronic credit monitoring from all three bureaus. It ends when your service does. Already separated? The freeze and the fraud alert above are the protections open to you now.

Understanding the number

• Most credit scores run from 300 to 850. But there is no single official score — different companies use different scoring models, and you have more than one score.
• Words like "poor," "fair," "good," "very good," or "exceptional" attached to a range come from the scoring company, not the government. Ask any lender which score, and which model, they pulled.