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Your credit reports and scores are both important, but they're not the same thing. Your credit report contains information about your history of repaying and managing financial obligations. A credit score is a three-digit number that's calculated by analyzing the information in a credit report.
How Are Credit Scores and Credit Reports Different?
Your credit reports and scores are different but connected. Your credit report shows your history with certain types of credit accounts, while your credit score is a number calculated from that information to estimate credit risk. Here's a brief overview and recap of how consumer credit reports and credit scores differ:
What Is a Credit Report?
A credit report is a digital record that contains information about a person and their history of paying credit accounts, such as loans and credit cards. The major consumer credit bureaus, Experian, TransUnion and Equifax, collect and store data to create credit reports.
What Information Is on a Credit Report?
Your credit report can contain different types of information, which is generally organized into several sections:
- Personal information: This includes your name, address, year of birth and possibly employer.
- Accounts: These could include loans and credit cards, and potentially other types of monthly bills. Your open, closed and collection accounts are generally separated.
- Public records: Bankruptcy filings from the last seven to 10 years are the only public records on your credit report.
- Recent inquiries: Records of when a company or person (including yourself) checked your credit report.
Note: Your credit report is important because organizations can request a copy before making a decision on whether to approve your application for a loan, a credit card, rental home or even a job. The information in your credit reports is also the basis for your credit scores.
Your credit report will also have details about each account, such as the date you took out a loan, the loan amount, your monthly payment amount and your history of making late or on-time payments. The credit bureaus receive most of the information that appears on your credit reports from creditors.
Example: When you apply for a loan, the lender may report the personal information from your application, such as your name and address. Once you take out the loan, it reports the account information and regularly sends updates about your payments and your account's status (whether it's being paid on time or not). The credit bureaus can then include this information in your credit reports.
Learn more: What's Not Included in Your Credit Report?
What Is a Credit Score?
A credit score is the result of a mathematical formula that evaluates the information in one of your credit reports to assess credit risk. Companies build these formulas, called credit scoring models, based on historical data from millions of anonymized credit reports. By analyzing the data, they can create complex models to help predict the likelihood that someone will miss a payment in the future.
FICO and VantageScore are the two main companies that create consumer credit scoring models. Both companies maintain multiple versions of their credit scores, which is why you may have many different credit scores. Lenders may also create their own credit score models.
What Impacts Credit Scores?
Each credit scoring model uses slightly different criteria to determine a score. However, many scoring models use similar factors, and these are commonly grouped into several categories:
- Payment history: Your history of making debt payments on time or missing payments.
- Amounts owed: How much you owe on loans and how your credit card balancescompare with their credit limits.
- Length of credit history: The age of your credit account history, which could include the age of your oldest and newest accounts and the average age of all your accounts.
- Recent activity: How many accounts you've applied for and opened recently.
- Types of credit accounts: Whether you have experience with different types of accounts, such as credit cards and loans.
Most credit scoring models only consider the information in your credit report when calculating a score, and different types of information might help or hurt your credit scores. For example, paying down a credit card balance could help your scores, but missing a loan payment could hurt them.
Note: There are a few scoring models from FICO and VantageScore that can consider information that's not in your credit report. For example, with your permission, the scoring model might consider data from one or more of your bank accounts. But the most commonly used scores only consider information from a credit report.
What's a Good Credit Score?
Many credit scores range from 300 to 850. A higher score is better because it indicates you are less likely to miss payments in the future. This is why having a good credit score—a score of 670 or higher when looking at your FICO® Score☉ Θ—can help you get approved for new accounts with more favorable terms.
Using credit, making payments on time and keeping credit card balances low can help improve your credit scores over time. Additionally, you can use Experian Boost®ø®ø to add certain phone, rent, utility, insurance and popular streaming service payments to your Experian credit report. These accounts can add positive payment information, which could help your credit.
Learn more: How to Improve Your Credit Score
Why Are Your Credit Scores and Credit Reports Important?
Your credit reports and credit scores are both parts of your overall creditworthiness. Having good credit can be important because it helps you:
- Qualify for more accounts: Your credit can impact your eligibility for credit cards, loans, cellphone plans and a rental home.
- Save money on loans and insurance: The information in your credit report can impact how much you pay in fees and interest on credit accounts. Credit-based insurance scores may also impact how much you pay for insurance premiums. Though these are not exactly the same as your consumer credit scores, the same factors that impact your regular credit scores impact your credit-based insurance scores.
- Save on security deposits: You may have to pay more fees or a larger security deposit for utility and telecom accounts if you don't have good credit.
- Get a job in some cases: Your credit report (but not a credit score) may impact your ability to get a job or a promotion.
Even if you don't plan on taking out a loan or opening a credit card, establishing and building good credit could give you more options and save you money.
How to Check Your Credit Report and Credit Score
You can check your credit reports and scores at any time, and checking your own credit will never hurt your credit. Others can only check your credit if they have a permissible purpose, such as reviewing your credit when you apply for a new account.
Experian offers you a free credit report, FICO® Score and credit monitoring with daily updates when you log in. You'll also receive insight into how the information in your credit report is helping or hurting your credit score.
If you don't have a credit report yet, you can get started with Experian Go™, which helps you create a credit file and start building your credit with a personalized credit path. Once you have six months of credit history on your report, FICO can create a credit score for you.
Learn more: Get Free Credit Reports From All 3 Credit Bureaus
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Your Credit Report Include Your Credit Score?
Your credit report won't necessarily include a credit score, but many companies that offer you a credit report will include a score based on the report. For example, Experian members can see their Experian credit report, and a FICO® Score based on the report, for free. You also might be able to get free access to one or more of your credit reports and credit scores from other sources, including AnnualCreditReport.com.
When Should You Check Your Credit Report vs. Credit Score?
You should check your credit report when you want to review and understand the underlying information that's impacting your credit scores. Additionally, reviewing your credit report can be helpful for detecting signs of identity theft, such as when someone uses your information to open a new credit card or loan.
You should check your credit score when you're preparing to apply for a loan or card. Regularly monitoring your credit can also help you determine how different actions impact your credit score and when you might be ready to request a credit limit increase or apply for a new account.
Can You Have a Credit Report But No Credit Score?
You can have a credit report that doesn't have enough information for some types of credit scoring models to score. For example, FICO® Scores require your credit report to have a credit account that's at least six months old and activity on a credit account (it can be a different account) within the past six months. If you only have a collection account or a new credit card, you'll have a credit report with no credit score. You may be scoreable by VantageScore sooner, potentially within one or two months after opening an active credit account.
Does Checking Your Credit Report Hurt Your Credit Score?
Checking your credit report never affects your credit scores. Whenever you check your report, a record of the request is added to your credit report as a soft inquiry. But soft inquiries don't impact (help or hurt) your credit scores.
The Bottom Line
Monitoring your credit reports and scores can both be important. Regularly checking your credit reports for accuracy can help you detect errors and signs of identity fraud, especially because your credit reports hold the underlying data that largely determines your credit scores. Monitoring your credit scores can be helpful when you want to know whether you'll likely get approved for a new credit line. Many services offer credit report and scoring monitoring, and Experian offers access to your credit report and scores for free.