To calculate your credit age, pull your credit reports, find the “date opened” for every account, and work out two numbers: the age of your oldest account, and the average age across all your accounts. Both are simple arithmetic once you have the dates in front of you. The only real judgment calls are which accounts to include, and those depend on whether a tradeline is open, closed, or one you’re an authorized user on.
Get Your “Date Opened” Data First
Every calculation starts with the “date opened” field on your credit report, which shows the month and year each account was first established. You need this date for every tradeline that appears: credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, student loans, and anything else.
Free weekly reports from all three bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) are available at AnnualCreditReport.com. The bureaus made weekly access permanent, and Equifax is offering six additional free reports per year through 2026.1Federal Trade Commission. Free Credit Reports Federal law also entitles you to at least one free report from each bureau every 12 months.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681j – Charges for Certain Disclosures
Pull all three. Creditors don’t always report to every bureau, so an account on your Experian report might be missing from TransUnion, and your calculations will differ depending on which report you use. If you’re checking your credit age ahead of a specific application, ask the lender which bureau they use and work from that report.
One quirk with business cards: some issuers report them to personal credit and some don’t. Check whether your business card actually appears on your personal report before including it in the math.
Find Your Oldest Account Age
Scan the “date opened” entries and pick the earliest one. That’s your oldest account, and its age is the first of your two numbers. If you opened your first credit card in March 2015 and it’s now June 2026, that account is 11 years and 3 months old. FICO counts age by month, not by the specific day.3myFICO. How Credit History Length Affects Your FICO Score
This number only moves in one direction as long as that account stays on your report. But if the account is removed — through a successful dispute, or because it ages off — your “oldest account” becomes your second-oldest, and your reported credit history can shorten by years overnight. Worth thinking about before you ask for an old but legitimate account to be deleted.
Calculate Your Average Account Age
Average account age is the total age of all your accounts divided by the number of accounts. The cleanest approach is to convert every account’s age to months first, add them up, then divide.
Say you have four accounts and you’re calculating as of June 2026:
- Credit card opened January 2018: 101 months
- Auto loan opened July 2020: 71 months
- Credit card opened March 2023: 39 months
- Student loan opened August 2024: 22 months
Add: 101 + 71 + 39 + 22 = 233 months. Divide by four: 233 ÷ 4 = 58.25 months, or about 4 years and 10 months. That’s your average account age.
To convert any single account to months, take the difference in years and multiply by 12, then add the difference in months. An account opened in January 2018, measured in June 2026, is 8 years and 5 months, or (8 × 12) + 5 = 101 months.
The arithmetic is easy. The harder question is which accounts belong in the total.
Decide Which Accounts to Count
Whether an account counts toward your credit age depends on the scoring model and the type of account. This is where two people looking at the same credit report can produce different numbers.
Closed Accounts
FICO includes both open and closed accounts when calculating length of credit history. As long as a closed account still appears on your report, FICO keeps counting it, and its age continues to grow.4FICO. More Scoring Myths: Closing Credit Cards So a card you closed two years ago that was opened ten years ago still counts as a twelve-year-old account in your FICO average.
VantageScore may exclude some closed accounts from its age calculations, which can lower your average under that model.5Capital One. Length of Credit History If you want to know your VantageScore-based average, you’d redo the calculation using only the accounts that model would include, which depends on the specific VantageScore version.
Closed accounts in good standing typically remain on your credit report for about 10 years after the closure date. That’s industry practice at the major bureaus, not a statutory requirement. The federal statute covering reporting timelines addresses only negative information.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681c – Requirements Relating to Information Contained in Consumer Reports Once that roughly 10-year window closes and the bureau removes the account, it stops counting in your average.
Authorized User Accounts
When someone adds you as an authorized user on their credit card, that account often appears on your credit report with its original opening date, not the date you were added. If your parent adds you to a card they’ve had for 20 years, FICO factors that 20-year-old tradeline into your average.
Include authorized user accounts in your own calculation to see the FICO-style average. Just know that mortgage lenders and other sophisticated underwriters can identify authorized user tradelines and may discount or exclude them during manual review, so the number a lender sees may not match the number your calculation produces.
New Accounts
Every new account enters your average at zero months and pulls the average down. The dilution is heavier when you have few existing tradelines: someone with 10 accounts averaging 8 years absorbs a new account with little damage, while someone with 2 accounts averaging 3 years feels it hard.7myFICO. How New Credit Impacts Your Credit Score Include the new account in your calculation the month it opens.
Recalculate When Your Report Changes
Your credit age isn’t static. Several events shift the numbers enough to warrant rerunning the math:
- A disputed account is removed. If your oldest tradeline gets deleted because the information was inaccurate, your oldest-account number drops to whatever comes next, and your average changes as well.
- An old closed account ages off. When a positive closed account passes the roughly 10-year mark and the bureau removes it, your average drops with no action on your part.
- You open new credit. Each new account adds a zero-month tradeline to the denominator and can cut your average by years if you open several in a short window.
- You’re added as an authorized user, or removed from one. The tradeline appears or disappears with whatever opening date the primary account carries.
Each time one of these happens, pull a fresh report, update your list of accounts and their opening dates, and run the two calculations again. Knowing where the numbers stand helps you time future applications and avoid surprises when a lender pulls your file.