The information on a credit report falls into five main categories: personal identifying details, credit accounts and payment history, public records (essentially bankruptcy filings), collection accounts, and a log of who has requested your file. The three national credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — compile this information from lenders, creditors, and public records, and banks, insurers, landlords, and employers use it to judge how likely you are to meet financial obligations.1Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act Your credit score is not stored in the report; it’s calculated separately from the data the report contains.
Identifying Information
The top of your report lists the details used to confirm your identity: your full legal name and any former names or aliases, current and previous home addresses, Social Security number, and date of birth. Current and past employers may also appear, drawn from information you supplied on past credit applications.
Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the bureaus must follow reasonable procedures to keep this information accurate.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681e – Compliance Procedures None of these details feed into your credit score. They exist purely for identification.
Credit Accounts and Payment History
The bulk of your report is a list of your individual credit accounts, often called tradelines. Each tradeline carries several pieces of information about a single account:
- The account type — revolving (like a credit card), installment (like an auto or student loan), or a mortgage.
- The creditor’s name and a partially masked account number.
- The date the account was opened.
- The credit limit on a revolving account, or the original loan amount on an installment loan.
- The current balance as of the most recent reporting date.
- The scheduled or minimum monthly payment.
- The account status: open, closed by you, closed by the creditor, or charged off.
Closed accounts note who did the closing. Each tradeline also shows the date of last activity and the date the creditor last reported to the bureau. If a debt is transferred or sold to a different lender, that transition shows up in the record, so the full history of an account can be traced from opening to final payment.
Payment History
Payment history is one of the most heavily weighted factors in credit scoring. Creditors report each month whether you paid on time or how far behind you fell, usually in increments of 30, 60, 90, or 120-plus days past due.3TransUnion. How Long Do Late Payments Stay on Your Credit Report A late payment stays on your report for seven years, measured from the date you first missed the payment.4Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. How Long Does Information Stay on My Credit Report The report also tracks the highest balance you’ve carried on revolving accounts.
Authorized User Accounts
If someone has added you as an authorized user on their credit card, that account can appear on your report, labeled to show you’re not the primary account holder. You get the benefit of the account’s positive payment history without being legally responsible for the debt, but negative history from the primary holder can also land on your file.
Buy Now, Pay Later Loans
Most buy now, pay later loans still do not appear on credit reports. Reporting practices vary by provider: Affirm began reporting in 2025, while Klarna and Afterpay have been cautious about it, citing concerns that traditional scoring models could misread frequent short-term borrowing as elevated risk.5Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Buy Now, Pay Later: Recent Developments and Implications
Public Records
Public records on a credit report today are limited almost entirely to bankruptcy filings. Federal law lets a consumer reporting agency include a bankruptcy for up to ten years from the date the court entered the order for relief.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681c – Requirements Relating to Information Contained in Consumer Reports In practice, the three major bureaus remove a completed Chapter 13 bankruptcy after seven years and keep a Chapter 7 for the full ten.
Tax liens and civil judgments used to appear routinely, but the bureaus removed nearly all of them starting in mid-2017 under the National Consumer Assistance Plan settlement. That settlement required every public record to include a name, address, and either a Social Security number or date of birth, and to be refreshed at least every 90 days. Most court records didn’t meet those criteria. All civil judgments came off, and by April 2018 the remaining tax liens were dropped as well.7Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Removal of Public Records Has Little Effect on Consumers’ Credit Scores
Collection Accounts
When you fall significantly behind on a debt, the original creditor may send or sell the account to a collection agency, and that collection appears as a separate entry showing the collection agency’s name, the original creditor, the amount owed, and the date the account first became delinquent. Even if you pay the collection in full, it stays on your report for seven years from the original delinquency date.8Federal Trade Commission. Fair Credit Reporting Act – Section 605
Paying a collection won’t erase it, but it can soften the damage to your score. Newer scoring models, including VantageScore 3.0 and 4.0 and FICO 9 and 10, either ignore paid collections or greatly reduce their weight. Older models that many lenders still use treat a paid collection almost like an unpaid one.
Overdue Child Support
Federal law requires every state to report to credit bureaus the name and amount owed by any noncustodial parent who is delinquent on child support, after the parent has been given notice and a chance to contest the accuracy of the information.9Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 666 – Requirement of Statutorily Prescribed Procedures to Improve Effectiveness of Child Support Enforcement Overdue child support can appear on your report as a collection account and typically stays for seven years from the date of delinquency.
Medical Debt
Medical collections follow modified rules. Since 2022, the three major bureaus have voluntarily agreed to exclude medical debt from credit reports if the balance is under $500, if the debt has been in collections for less than one year, or if it has already been paid. In early 2025, the CFPB finalized a rule that would have banned medical debt from credit reports altogether, but a federal court vacated that rule in July 2025, finding it exceeded the agency’s authority.10Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. CFPB Finalizes Rule to Remove Medical Bills from Credit Reports The bureaus’ voluntary policies remain in place. Smaller and recently incurred medical debts are still largely excluded, but larger medical collections more than a year old can still show up.
Credit Inquiries
Every time an organization requests your credit file, the request is logged. Inquiries fall into two types:
- Hard inquiries happen when you apply for a new credit card, loan, or mortgage. They appear on the version of your report that lenders see and can affect your credit score. They stay on your report for up to two years but influence most scoring models for only a few months.11Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What Is a Credit Inquiry
- Soft inquiries happen when a company checks your file for a promotional offer, when an employer runs a background check, or when you check your own report. Soft inquiries are visible only to you and never affect your score.
If you’re comparing mortgage or auto loan offers from multiple lenders, you don’t need to worry about each application generating a separate score hit. Most scoring models treat multiple inquiries for the same type of loan within a short window as a single inquiry. VantageScore uses a 14-day window, and FICO allows up to 45 days.12TransUnion. How Rate Shopping Can Impact Your Credit Score Shopping around within 14 days gives you the broadest protection regardless of which model a lender uses.
What Is Not on Your Credit Report
Knowing what your report leaves out matters just as much as knowing what it holds. A credit report does not include:
- Income or employment details beyond your employer’s name. Salary, hourly wage, and net worth are never reported.
- Bank and investment accounts. Checking balances, savings accounts, and brokerage holdings do not appear.
- Demographic characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or disability status.
- Criminal records. Arrests and convictions may appear on other types of background checks, but not on a credit report.
- Individual purchases at stores, restaurants, or online retailers.
- Your credit score. The score is calculated from your report data, but is not stored inside the report.
How to See Your Own Report
You can request a free copy of your report from each of the three bureaus every week through AnnualCreditReport.com. This weekly access, originally a temporary pandemic-era program, is now permanent.13Federal Trade Commission. You Now Have Permanent Access to Free Weekly Credit Reports Federal law separately guarantees one free report from each bureau every 12 months, but the expanded program means you can check far more often at no cost.
Because each bureau collects data independently, an error or a fraudulent account can appear on one report and not the others, so checking all three is worthwhile.