How Often Does Your Credit Report Get Updated?

How Often Does Your Credit Report Get Updated? article image.

Your credit report is a record of your payment history of your financial accounts.

Banks, credit card companies, auto lenders and mortgage companies that you do business with report your payment history monthly to one of more of the three main credit reporting companies, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. However, all these companies may not report data at the same time in the month.

So What Does That Mean?

What that means is that your credit report can be constantly changing, especially if you have a lot of accounts. And since your credit report can change often, so can your credit scores since scores are based off the data from your credit report.

Let's put this into a real world example. Let's say you had a really rough month with your kitchen appliances and they all broke beyond repair at the same time.

You decide to buy new appliances for $7,000, and pay with an existing credit card account with a $10,000 limit. Also hypothetically, say this particular credit card company reports data to the credit reporting companies immediately after you make your purchase. For a period of time, your account will have a high credit utilization ratio, meaning that your spending is close to the credit limit.


Of course, once you start paying down the balance on the account, your credit utilization ratio will decrease, and your credit scores will reflect that positively.

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 2022 at AnnualCreditReport.