Credit Bureaus
Learn what a credit bureau is and how it can help you.
What Is a Credit Bureau?
Credit bureaus are clearinghouses for historical credit information. Credit grantors provide the bureaus with updates on customers’ outstanding loans, bill-paying habits, and overall credit history. The bureaus assemble these updates into “files” on each consumer with public information obtained from courts records around the country and make them available to credit grantors.
What Do Credit Bureaus Do?
Credit bureaus generate more than a half-billion credit reports a year to make credit buying faster, easier, and safer for qualified consumers. However, they do not “rate” your credit, since each credit grantor or lender has different requirements for the extension of credit. Credit bureaus do not approve or reject consumer applications for credit. They merely report the information provided by the credit grantors.
Who Are the Major Credit Bureaus?
Most credit bureaus are either owned or under contract with one of the nation’s three major credit reporting agencies: Trans Union, Experian, and Equifax. These national agencies maintain centralized databases containing the credit records of more than 170 million Americans.
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