How Often Your Credit Score Is Updated
If you are looking for a new credit card, home or car loan, you will probably want to make sure that your loan is in the best possible shape. But knowing when is the right time to apply may depend on when your credit rating changes. And it could have happened at any moment.
“The short answer is, it happens every time it is calculated – whenever a request is made to your credit report,” writes Experian. But this does not mean that your score changes from second to second.
Most lenders report balances on a monthly basis. In theory, this could mean that your credit rating is different from Wednesday to Thursday if your creditors provided information on Wednesday that positively or negatively affected it. But this usually happens on a monthly basis.
Every time Experian is provided with new information, your FICO rating using Experian data can go up or down, explains Experian’s credit bureau, and this is true for the other two major bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion as well. “You could even have two different FICO scores in the same day if information was added to your profile during that day to influence it enough to register a change.” In addition, just because the information was transmitted to Experian, for example, on Wednesday, does not mean that it was also transmitted to Equifax and TransUnion on the same day.
The biggest changes take months or even years. Credit expansion takes time, but bad marks – like late payments, debt collection, written off bills, etc. – can take seven years to fall out of your report. However, after this time, credit agencies should immediately erase the bad marks.
Apps that provide your rating, such as Credit Karma, may also not always have the most up-to-date information, which you should be aware of if you are using them to determine your creditworthiness for a particular product. “Since we do not receive information about credit reports directly from lenders, we do not know when a particular lender will update your information,” notes Credit Karma . “But by checking regularly, you can keep track of updates – and at the same time track for bugs.”
Ultimately, it’s the length of your credit history and timely payments that matters most, not the weekly or monthly fluctuations. It is more important to pay attention to these categories than to your score at one time.