Credit glossary
Credit report
A bureau's record of your credit accounts, payment history, inquiries and collections, used by lenders and others to judge risk.
The CFPB describes it as a statement of your credit activity and current credit situation, built from what creditors and others report. Most reports have four parts: identifying information, accounts or tradelines, inquiries, and public records or collections. Scores are calculated from this data, so the report is where both real problems and errors live. Each of the three nationwide bureaus keeps its own version.
Read every number as a claim you could check. Compare balances, statuses, payment history and dates against your own statements, and mark each problem as either wrong and provable or unflattering but true. Only the first kind belongs in a dispute. Weekly reports from all three bureaus are free at AnnualCreditReport.com.
Guides that go deeper
- How to read your credit report, line by line and field by fieldWhat each section and field on an Equifax, Experian or TransUnion report means, which dates matter most, and how to tell normal entries from real errors.
- How to get your credit reports free, weekly, from all three bureausAnnualCreditReport.com is the only federally authorized source for free weekly reports from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. How to order and avoid fakes.
Sources
- What is a credit report?, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- Disputing Errors on Your Credit Reports, Federal Trade Commission
- Free Credit Reports, Federal Trade Commission
This is education, not legal or financial advice. Spot an error? Tell us and we'll fix it.