Why do credit reports vary

Checking your credit reports from the credit bureaus will not affect your credit scores. When you check your credit report, a "soft" credit inquiry is posted to that report. Soft inquiries, which are different from hard inquiries, do not impact your credit scores. Even hard inquiries, which can be seen by scoring models, may not have any measurable impact on your credit scores.

Practice Good Credit Habits to Improve Your Scores While you have many different credit scores, they all have one thing in common: They're based on information in your credit reports. As long as your credit reports show responsible borrowing behavior, you are positioning yourself to earn and maintain good credit scores, regardless of the type of score, the date or the credit bureau report from which it is calculated.

By performing well in the credit scoring categories mentioned above, you will always have good credit scores. This means making all your debt payments on time, maintaining low credit card balances and applying for credit only when needed. The other two credit scoring categories—the age of your credit accounts and your account diversity—will improve over time as your credit reports age and become more populated with different types of credit experiences.

One final method of improving your credit scores is to add positive information to your credit reports. Learn what it takes to achieve a good credit score. The purpose of this question submission tool is to provide general education on credit reporting. The Ask Experian team cannot respond to each question individually. However, if your question is of interest to a wide audience of consumers, the Experian team may include it in a future post and may also share responses in its social media outreach.

If you have a question, others likely have the same question, too. By sharing your questions and our answers, we can help others as well. Personal credit report disputes cannot be submitted through Ask Experian. To dispute information in your personal credit report, simply follow the instructions provided with it.

Your personal credit report includes appropriate contact information including a website address, toll-free telephone number and mailing address. To submit a dispute online visit Experian's Dispute Center. If you have a current copy of your personal credit report, simply enter the report number where indicated, and follow the instructions provided. If you do not have a current personal report, Experian will provide a free copy when you submit the information requested.

Additionally, you may obtain a free copy of your report once a week through April at AnnualCreditReport. Some may not see improved scores or approval odds. Payments may also impact your debt to credit ratio and may also cause credit scores to change. Your debt to credit ratio takes into account all of your available credit versus the total of all your balances owed.

You can also create a myEquifax account to get six free Equifax credit reports each year. A VantageScore is one of many types of credit scores. If you find something you believe may be inaccurate or incomplete, contact the lender directly. You can also file a dispute with the credit bureau reporting the information. At Equifax, you can create a myEquifax account to file a dispute. Of course, the offers on our platform don't represent all financial products out there, but our goal is to show you as many great options as we can.

The problem is, there are so many credit scoring models out there. How can you keep track of them all? And what should you do if your scores differ between credit-reporting agencies also known as credit bureaus? Since your FICO Scores depend on the data listed on your credit reports, you might not see the exact same score from every credit-reporting agency. Of course, there may be other reasons for any discrepancies in your scores; more on that later.

The good news? Many agencies look at similar factors when calculating your credit scores. Here at Credit Karma, we want to help you develop the healthy financial habits that credit-reporting agencies look for when they crunch your credit scores. Custom scores are based on specialized risk algorithms tailored to a specific lender for a specific purpose, like auto loans. A custom scoring model may place more or less weight on certain factors based on the type of credit that will be extended and the potential risks associated with it.

Your credit history is maintained in reports at three different credit bureaus: TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian, the publisher of this piece.

Because all lenders don't always report information to each bureau, the same scoring model using the data from one credit bureau could yield a different score when using data from another credit bureau. There's an important distinction you should know as well: The credit reporting companies are not the entities that make loan and credit decisions.

If you have credit denied or are approved for a higher interest rate than desired, that's because a specific lender or creditor reviewed various criteria such as your credit scores, information from your credit report such as your past payment history , and other factors not included in your credit report such as your income , and then decided not to extend you additional credit.

Learn more here about how information gets on your credit report here. Most scoring models use a similar scale, though some go as low as and as high as These scoring models are developed with a specific goal in mind and allow lenders to be highly specific in their prediction model.

Checking your credit scores has never been easier than it is today. In fact, you likely already have free access to some of your credit scores. When I was seeking my credit scores, I started with the credit cards in my wallet. Every single one of my card issuers offered me access to some version of my credit score for free.

I figured this was a good place to begin, considering these banks already had access to my sensitive financial data. Discover, Chase and Barclays also offered similar services. Next, I checked Mint. I also remembered that years ago, I had signed up for an account at Credit Karma, a website that offers free credit scores for educational purposes. The number produced by Mint and Credit Karma was the same, which makes sense because they both employ the same scoring model using data from the same credit bureau.

For the record, the three scores from each different bureau were very close, but not exactly the same. It reminded me to examine my credit reports more closely to see where the discrepancies might come from. The bottom line is that you can find your credit scores in four ways:.

If there isn't one credit score to rule them all, what's the point of even looking them up? And if some banks and lenders develop their own custom scoring models, isn't seeking your credit scores a futile exercise?

But looking at a few multiple scores is a smart exercise to help you understand how your credit is doing. Each model approaches it in a slightly different way.

But the variables that go into predicting default behaviors are all similar: Have you been late on your bills before? Are you late frequently?

Is your credit utilization high? So when you get a score that tells you you're high risk or low risk, generally other scores will do the same.

That was evident by all the credit scores I pulled. Notably, with one exception, none of the scores generated by either the credit card issuers, the free services or Experian IdentityWorks yielded exactly the same number. But all the scores came with some context about what the numbers meant, including a scale that consisted of four to six bands divided up into categories that were all some variation of the following: exceptional, very good, good, fair, poor.

My scores consistently fell into the second-highest category of credit, though many services had different names for the same bands. Because we all have so many credit scores in our name, there is no point in chasing every single one down—because you likely don't even have access to most of them.

Instead, it's smarter to look at a few and compare the results. If they do, that could be a red flag that something is off on one of your credit reports.