A credit report contains six kinds of information: personal details that identify you, your individual credit accounts and their payment history, collection accounts, bankruptcy records, a log of everyone who has recently requested your file, and — depending on the source — a few voluntary additions like some buy now, pay later loans. The three national credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, build these reports from data supplied by lenders, creditors, and public records, and lenders, insurers, landlords, and employers read them to judge how likely you are to meet a financial obligation.1Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act What’s on the report is more limited than most people assume, and what’s missing matters just as much.
Personal and Identifying Information
The first section of your report exists to confirm who you are. It shows your full legal name along with any former names or aliases, your current and previous addresses, your Social Security number, and your date of birth. Current and past employers may also appear, drawn from what you listed on credit applications.
None of this information affects your credit score. It’s used purely for identity verification, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires the bureaus to follow reasonable procedures to keep it accurate.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681e – Compliance Procedures
Credit Accounts
The largest part of your report is a list of your individual credit accounts, called tradelines. Each tradeline covers one account and includes:
- The account type: revolving (like a credit card), installment (like a car or student loan), or mortgage.
- The creditor’s name and a partially masked account number.
- The date the account was opened.
- Your credit limit on a revolving account, or the original loan amount on an installment loan.
- The current balance as of the last reporting date.
- The scheduled monthly payment.
- The account’s status: open, closed by you, closed by the creditor, or charged off.
Closed accounts note who closed them. Each tradeline also records the date of last activity and the date the creditor last reported to the bureau. If an account is sold or transferred to another lender, that handoff appears in the record, so you can trace a debt from opening through final payment.
Payment History
Every month, creditors report whether you paid on time or fell behind, 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 from the date you first missed it.4Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. How Long Does Information Stay on My Credit Report Revolving accounts also show your highest balance over time, which gives lenders a sense of how much of your available credit you’ve historically used.
Authorized User Accounts
If someone added you as an authorized user on their credit card, that account can show up on your report and is labeled as such. You share in the positive payment history without being legally responsible for the debt. The reverse is also true: missed payments by the primary holder can appear on your report.
Buy Now, Pay Later Loans
Short-term buy now, pay later loans mostly don’t show up yet. Affirm began reporting to the major bureaus in 2025; Klarna and Afterpay have held back, citing concerns that traditional scoring models could read frequent short-term borrowing as elevated risk.5Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Buy Now, Pay Later: Recent Developments and Implications Some providers let you opt in to reporting, but most BNPL accounts still don’t appear automatically.
Collection Accounts
When you fall far enough behind, the original creditor may send or sell the debt to a collection agency. The collection then appears as its own entry, listing the collection agency, the original creditor, the amount owed, and the date the account first became delinquent. Paying the collection doesn’t remove it. The record stays for seven years from that original delinquency date.6Federal Trade Commission. Fair Credit Reporting Act – Section 605
Paying it off can still help your score. Newer scoring models (VantageScore 3.0 and 4.0, FICO 9 and 10) either ignore paid collections or reduce their weight significantly, while older models many lenders still use treat a paid collection almost the same as an unpaid one.
Overdue Child Support
Federal law requires every state to report the name and amount owed by any noncustodial parent who is delinquent on child support, after that parent has received notice and a chance to contest the information.7Office 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 as a collection and typically remains for seven years from the delinquency date.
Medical Debt
Medical collections follow different rules. Since 2022, the three bureaus have voluntarily agreed not to report medical debt if the balance is under $500, if the debt has been in collections for less than a year, or if it has already been paid. The CFPB finalized a rule in early 2025 that would have banned medical debt from credit reports entirely, but a federal court vacated that rule in July 2025 as exceeding the agency’s authority.8Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. CFPB Finalizes Rule to Remove Medical Bills from Credit Reports The bureaus’ voluntary policies still stand, so smaller and recent medical debts are excluded, but larger, older medical collections can still appear.
Public Records
Public records on a credit report are limited almost entirely to bankruptcy filings. Federal law lets a bureau report a bankruptcy for up to ten years from the date the court entered the order for relief.9Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681c – Requirements Relating to Information Contained in Consumer Reports In practice, the bureaus remove a completed Chapter 13 (which involves a repayment plan) after seven years, while a Chapter 7 liquidation stays the full ten.
Civil judgments and tax liens used to appear routinely, but the bureaus removed almost all of them starting in mid-2017 under the National Consumer Assistance Plan. New standards required each 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 standards, so civil judgments came off entirely, and by April 2018 the remaining tax liens were gone as well.10Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Removal of Public Records Has Little Effect on Consumers’ Credit Scores
Credit Inquiries
Every request for your credit file is logged. There are two kinds:
- Hard inquiries happen when you apply for a new credit card, loan, or mortgage. They show up on the version of your report lenders see, can affect your score, and stay on your report for up to two years, though they influence most scoring models for only a few months.11Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What Is a Credit Inquiry
- Soft inquiries happen when a company screens you for a promotional offer, when an employer runs a background check, or when you check your own report. They’re visible only to you and never affect your score.
If you’re shopping for a mortgage or auto loan, multiple applications for the same type of loan within a short window are treated as a single inquiry. VantageScore uses a 14-day window; FICO allows up to 45 days.12TransUnion. How Rate Shopping Can Impact Your Credit Score Staying inside 14 days protects you across both models.
What Is Not on Your Credit Report
Because people often assume a credit report contains more than it does, it helps to know what’s missing:
- Your income, salary, or net worth. Your employer’s name may appear, but no compensation data.
- Checking, savings, and investment account balances.
- Race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, and disability status.
- Arrests and criminal convictions, which may show up on other kinds 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 but isn’t stored inside it.
How to See Your Own Report
You can pull a free copy of your report from each of the three bureaus every week at AnnualCreditReport.com. What began as a temporary pandemic-era expansion is now permanent.13Federal Trade Commission. You Now Have Permanent Access to Free Weekly Credit Reports Each bureau collects data independently, so an error or a fraudulent account can appear on one report and not the others. Checking all three is the only way to see everything creditors might see about you.