How and Where To Get Your Free Credit Reports

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Did you know that you have the right to free credit reports every year?

Thanks to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), you can request one free credit report per year from each of the three major credit bureaus: Equifax®, Experian™, and TransUnion®. This is an important ability for consumers, giving you a free way to check and maintain the accuracy of your credit reports.

How To Claim Your Free Annual Credit Reports

Your credit reports contain personal information, along with financial details like your credit accounts (open and closed), the recent balances and credit limits of your credit cards, and your payment history.

Getting your free credit reports every year is easy.

There’s only one official source, authorized by federal law and sponsored by the three major bureaus: AnnualCreditReport.com. This website will not ask you to pay for your credit reports, although you may see ads for paid credit monitoring services. If you’re being asked to pay to see your reports you may have accidentally went to an imposter website instead.

It’s easiest to request your credit reports online, but there are three different methods you can use:

• Online:https://www.annualcreditreport.com
• By phone:1-877-322-8228
• By mail: Fill out and mail the Annual Credit Report Request Form

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We recommend using certified mail if you send in a request so you can be sure the bureau receives your letter.

You’ll need to provide your name, date of birth, address, and Social Security number. For your security, when making a request online, you’ll also need to provide some additional information based on the data in your credit reports. You cannot use your Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) in place of your SSN.

If you make the request online, you should receive your report(s) almost immediately. If you make a request by phone, your report(s) should be mailed to you within 15 days. And for requests by mail, you should receive your report(s) within 15 days of receipt.

If you have any trouble with this process, you can call the phone number above for help.

You can request all three of your credit reports at once, or you can request just one or two. If you’re planning to monitor your credit by keeping tabs on your credit reports, we suggest staggering your requests throughout the year: one every four months. That will give you a chance to periodically review your credit in case anything changes.

Here’s a sample schedule you can use:

You may also be eligible to get free credit reports through other methods. And you can always pay $11.50 for a copy of any one of your credit reports.

Take note that since we’re dealing with three different credit bureaus, and three different credit reports, the information in those reports won’t necessarily be identical. Something could change with your Equifax® report, for example, but not your other reports; and if you don’t check your Equifax® report specifically, you won’t notice the change. Sometimes the differences between reports are minor, like slight account name variations, or sometimes they can be significant, like fraudulent accounts appearing on one report but not others.

Your free annual credit reports will not contain any information about your credit scores.