Jump-Start Your Credit: Get Your Credit Reports | Smart Change: Personal Finance

Your credit report information May be common, With your permission, when applying for credit, a job, rent or a utility. Lenders and credit card issuers usually check your balance to determine if your application will be approved, and under what conditions.

The credit report doesn’t match the credit score, and the reports don’t include your score.

Credit bureaus sell access to credit reports to credit rating companies, which manage some data through proprietary formulas to produce credit scores.

Therefore, a credit score is a number designed to help the lender or card issuer measure the risk involved in lending to you, while the credit report contains the data used to calculate that number. And since credit bureaus don’t have exactly the same data, they’ll likely get slightly different scores depending on the data set that was used for the calculation.

If you check a file Free credit scoreYou can also access the credit report. It will be an abbreviated copy of your full credit report, and it will come from the same credit bureau as your free score. You can use this information to stay up-to-date with your payment history, credit usage, recent apps and more, but it won’t be as detailed as your full credit report, which will likely come back in time and include a watch list for your report.