Your credit report is the raw record that lenders, landlords, and some insurers look at. Your credit score is calculated from it. If the report has a mistake, like an account that isn’t yours or a payment marked late that you made on time, the score built on top of it is wrong too. Checking takes about half an hour, and it’s free.
Getting the reports
There are three national credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. Each keeps its own file on you, and they don’t always match, because not every lender reports to all three.
The official site for free reports is AnnualCreditReport.com. Federal law gives you a free report from each bureau every 12 months, and the three bureaus have permanently extended a program that lets you check each report for free once a week. According to the CFPB, Equifax is also offering six additional free reports per year through AnnualCreditReport.com until December 2026. You can also request reports by phone at 1-877-322-8228 or by mail.
Be careful with look-alike sites and “free credit report” ads that ask for a card number. The site above is the one the FTC and CFPB point to. Checking your own report doesn’t hurt your score.
Pull all three. An error might show up on only one.
What to check, section by section
Personal information
Look at your name spellings, addresses, Social Security number, and employers. An old address or a misspelled name isn’t a big deal on its own. An address you’ve never lived at, or a name that isn’t a variation of yours, can be a sign of identity theft or a mixed file, where someone else’s information got merged with yours.
Accounts
This is the main section. For each credit card, loan, or mortgage, check:
- Do you recognize the account at all?
- Is it listed as open or closed correctly?
- Is the balance and credit limit roughly right? Balances lag by a month or so, which is normal.
- Is the payment history accurate? Look for any month marked 30, 60, or 90 days late.
- Is the same debt listed twice, for example once by the original lender and again by a collector, both showing a balance owed?
Collections and public records
Check that any collection account is actually yours, that the amount is right, and that it shows as paid if you paid it. Most negative information can generally stay on your report for seven years. Some bankruptcies can stay for up to ten. If something older than that is still there, it may be reportable as outdated.
Inquiries
Hard inquiries come from applications for credit. Soft inquiries, like checking your own report or prescreened offers, don’t affect your score. A hard inquiry from a lender you never applied with is worth looking into.
Disputing an error
You can dispute with the credit bureau that shows the error, with the company that supplied the information (the “furnisher,” such as your card issuer or a collection agency), or both. Disputing with both is often the most thorough approach.
Each bureau has an online dispute process, and you can also dispute by mail. Whichever you choose, include:
- Your full name, address, and the report’s confirmation or file number if it has one.
- Each item you’re disputing, the account number, and a plain explanation of what’s wrong. For example: “This account shows a 30-day late payment in March. I paid on time. Bank statement attached.”
- What you want done: corrected or removed.
- Copies, not originals, of supporting documents such as statements, payment confirmations, or a letter from the lender.
Keep copies of everything. If you mail it, certified mail with a return receipt gives you proof of when it arrived.
The bureau generally has to investigate within 30 days and pass your information to the furnisher. If the item can’t be verified or is found to be wrong, it must be corrected or deleted. You’ll get the results in writing, and you can ask the bureau to send a corrected report to anyone who pulled your report recently.
If the dispute doesn’t go your way
If the bureau says the information was verified and you still believe it’s wrong, you have options. You can send more documentation and dispute again. You can ask that a short statement explaining your side be added to your file. You can also submit a complaint to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at consumerfinance.gov/complaint, which forwards it to the company and tracks the response.
If the problem is accounts opened in your name by someone else, report it at IdentityTheft.gov. That site creates a recovery plan and an identity theft report you can use when asking bureaus to block fraudulent items.
A note on credit repair companies: there’s nothing they can legally do with a dispute that you can’t do yourself for free. They also can’t remove accurate negative information. Any company that promises to do that, or asks for payment before doing any work, is a red flag.
Once you’ve cleaned things up, a good habit is to pull one report every few months, rotating between bureaus, and check it the same way. Catching a problem early is far easier than fixing one a lender finds first.
This post is general information, not financial advice.