Checking your credit reports

When it comes to your financial health, your credit score is really important. So checking your credit reports is a good place to start when seeking to improve your financial health.

What is a credit report?

A credit report contains everything lenders like to know about you before they decide whether to let you borrow money from them. Credit reports contain lots of information on you, to include how you’ve handled credit in the past. They are created by credit references agencies. These are private companies, like Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.

The important things to know about credit reports are:

• There are three main UK Credit Reference Agencies (CRAs) - Experian, Equifax and TransUnion - and each owns a separate credit report about you.
  
  
• Differences between your three reports can damage your chances of getting credit, so it's best to check all three.
  
  
• Check your credit report for free with these services:
  
  ClearScore (uses Equifax data)*
  
  Experian App (uses Experian data)
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  ‍Intuit Credit Karma (uses TransUnion data)

*Transparency is important to us, we choose our partners very carefully, and only present financial products we think will work for you. If you sign up to ClearScore using the above link, then they will pay us commission for this.

What our friends at TSB say

"People often talk about their 'credit score', but there isn't a magic number that banks use to judge credit applications by. We get your borrowing history from the CRAs and apply our own criteria to that in order to make each individual decision."