Your rights
The Fair Credit Reporting Act, in plain language
You may dispute any item on your report, and the bureau must investigate. Here is what the statute actually requires, and what it does not.
- Published
- Reading time 2 min read
The Fair Credit Reporting Act is the federal law that governs what may appear on your credit report, who may look at it, and what happens when it is wrong. It is written for lawyers, but the parts that matter to you are short.
You may see your own file
You are entitled to your credit report from each of the three nationwide bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — free of charge through the official federal channel, AnnualCreditReport.com. You are also entitled to a free copy after an adverse action, such as being declined for credit, and the notice you receive must tell you which bureau supplied the report.
You may dispute what is wrong
If you believe an item is inaccurate or incomplete, you may dispute it directly with the bureau, free of charge and without anybody’s help. The bureau must then reinvestigate, usually within 30 days of receiving the dispute, and it must pass the dispute on to the company that furnished the information.
If the item cannot be verified, it must be deleted or corrected. If it is verified, it stays — and you may add a statement of dispute to your file.
Old information falls off
Most negative information may not be reported indefinitely. In general, it comes off after seven years; most bankruptcies come off after ten. Those clocks run from the date of the event, not from the date you noticed it or the date you paid it.
What the law does not give you
It gives you no right to have accurate, current and verifiable information removed, no matter how much you dislike it and no matter who you hire. It sets no guaranteed outcome and no guaranteed timeline for any dispute.
This is worth saying plainly, because it is the line between credit repair and a scam: the right you have is the right to an accurate file, not the right to a clean one.
Where we fit
Everything above, you may do yourself at no cost. What we sell is the reading and the preparation — going through three reports line by line, telling you what each item is and what we would do about it, and preparing the correspondence for the items you choose to dispute. We are not a law firm, and we do not provide legal advice.