How To Get A Free Credit Check

There are two reasons that you might want a free credit check. One is that you want to check your own credit report and score. The other is that you might want to run a credit check on somebody else. The rules for these two types of situation are very different so we will take them one at a time.

First, if you want to know what is being said about you in your credit history, it is pretty much always possible to find out. If you live in the USA you have the right to see your credit report once a year for free from the three main credit agencies. These are Equifax (Equifax.com), Experian (Experian.com) and Transunion (TransUnion.com).

If you are running into any problems getting credit then you should consult them all. It will help you find any mistakes that may have been reported about you and have them corrected. It will also let you see where you need to work on your budgeting or repayment plan to improve your credit score for the future.

If you live outside of the USA then you will need to investigate the main providers of credit reports for yourself. A quick search online will tell you what rights you have in your country. Or if you have been turned down for a loan or told that you have a bad credit score, call the finance company who told you that and ask them which credit agency they use. Then you can contact the same company and find out what their report about you contains. You almost certainly have the right under local laws to know what is being said about you. There will also be a procedure for reporting and correcting errors.

The second thing that you might want to do is to run a free credit check on somebody else. This is harder because as you will appreciate, there is a cost involved to the companies that provide credit reports and they have to cover this cost somehow. They are not allowed to charge the consumer, they have to provide a person's own credit report to that person for free. So the usual way that they make the money to run their service is to charge the lenders and other entities that want to check somebody's credit. In short, you have to pay a fee.

However, the credit agencies work in different ways and you may find that it is possible to get a limited amount of information for free. This might be something less than the full credit report but it might still be enough for your purposes. Or you may find a company that will let you run one credit check to test their service before joining.

In most cases, though, you have to be a member to run credit checks. This can involve either an annual fee or a pro rata fee where you pay per report, or a combination of the two. If you are a small time user, not planning to run many checks, then you will want to pay per report rather than paying an annual fee.

In fact it is very difficult to run a credit check on somebody for free unless you happen to have a friend who works for an organization that is a member of a credit agency such as a bank, finance provider, real estate rental company etc and is willing to run the check for you through their company account. But even then there may be a fee and this is not likely to be allowed under the credit agency's rules. So we cannot recommend this method of obtaining a free credit check report.