How to dispute an error on your credit report

Equifax, Experian and TransUnion do not hold the same data. Furnishers choose which bureaus they report to, and plenty report to one or two rather than all three. So an error you fix at Experian can sit untouched at TransUnion for years, surfacing the next time a lender pulls a different bureau. Start by getting all three, not the one you happen to have an app for.

The statutory route is AnnualCreditReport.com, the centralized source Congress required under §1681j. The CFPB gives the same site as the primary method, along with a phone line on (877) 322-8228 and a mail address at Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281. The federal floor is one free report from each bureau every 12 months; the CFPB notes you may be able to view free reports more frequently online through the same site, which in practice is where the widely advertised weekly access comes from.

You are also entitled to extra free reports in specific situations, and these are worth knowing because they usually coincide with discovering an error. The CFPB lists denial of credit, insurance or employment based on your report — within 60 days of the notice — suspected fraud, having placed a fraud alert, being unemployed and planning to look for work within 60 days, and receiving public assistance. Some states add their own entitlements. If none applies, a bureau may charge for a report, capped by law at a figure the CFPB currently gives as $14.50.

Do not stop at the big three. The CFPB publishes a list of consumer reporting companies that includes specialty firms feeding tenant screening, pre-employment screening, checking account and insurance decisions. The CFPB is clear that you can request your file from these companies too and that the same legal right to dispute inaccurate or incomplete information applies, with the investigation conducted at no charge. If you were turned down for an apartment or a checking account rather than a loan, the error is probably sitting in one of those files rather than in your credit report.

Read the report methodically rather than scanning for the number. Check the identifying header first — names, former names, addresses, employers — because a wrong address or a variant of your name is often the fingerprint of a mixed file, where someone else's data has been merged into yours. Then go account by account: the creditor, the account number's last digits, the date opened, the balance, the credit limit, the payment history grid, and the status. Then the collections, then the public records, then the inquiries.

Write down what is wrong and why, in the flat, unemotional register you will use in the dispute letter itself. "Account shown as 90 days late in March 2025; payment was made on time and the bank's statement is attached" is a dispute. "This is destroying my life" is not, and it gives the reviewer nothing to check.

The FCRA gives you a right to accuracy and completeness, not to a flattering file. If a payment was genuinely 60 days late, disputing it as "not mine" wastes the only leverage you have and trains the bureau to treat your correspondence as noise. Separate the two categories before you write anything: things that are factually wrong or incomplete, and things that are true and unwelcome. Only the first category is a dispute.

The clearest errors are ownership errors. An account you never opened. An account belonging to a relative with the same name, or to a stranger whose file has been merged with yours. A debt you were an authorized user on rather than liable for. A joint account showing after a divorce decree assigned it elsewhere — which, awkwardly, is often not an error at all, because a decree binds your ex-spouse and not the lender. Test each one against the question a furnisher will actually be asked: is this person liable on this account?

The second family is status errors, and they are the most common. A paid account still showing a balance. A settled or discharged debt not marked as such. A late payment in a month you paid on time. An account closed by you but reported as closed by the creditor. A collection agency and the original creditor both reporting the same debt as an outstanding balance, so one debt is counted twice. A charge-off still accruing an increasing balance long after the account was charged off.

The third family is obsolescence, and it is the one people miss. Section §1681c bars reporting most adverse items after seven years, and bankruptcies after ten. For a collection or a charge-off the seven years does not run from the collector's activity or from the date the debt was sold — it runs from the end of the 180-day period beginning with the delinquency that immediately preceded the charge-off or collection. Collectors who re-age a debt by reporting a fresh delinquency date are creating an error, and it is one you can show arithmetically.

The exceptions to those limits are narrow but real. A bureau may report beyond seven years where the report is used in connection with a credit transaction or life insurance underwriting involving $150,000 or more, or employment screening for a job paying $75,000 or more a year. Below those thresholds an old item has no business being there. The CFPB adds that judgments and lawsuits can be reported for seven years or until the governing statute of limitations runs out, whichever is longer.

Finally, inquiries. A hard inquiry you did not authorize is an error worth disputing, and a cluster of them is evidence of something worse. Promotional and account-review inquiries are visible only to you and do not affect scoring, so leave them alone. Knowing which of your objections are legally cognizable is not pedantry — it decides which letter gets a result and which gets a form reply.

File with each bureau that is showing the item, separately. The CFPB gives the routes: Equifax online at equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-dispute or on (866) 349-5191, Experian at experian.com/disputes/main.html or on (888) 397-3742, and TransUnion at dispute.transunion.com or on (800) 916-8800. Online is fastest and gives you a reference number; mail gives you a dated paper trail. Many people do both, filing online and following with a certified letter for the record.

The CFPB sets out what the dispute has to contain: your full name, address and telephone number, the account numbers concerned, a clear explanation of why you are disputing the information, a copy of the report with the disputed items highlighted, and copies — never originals — of any supporting documents. One item per dispute, stated in one or two sentences, with the evidence attached to it. A single letter objecting to eleven things at once invites a single blanket response.

Once the bureau receives it, §1681i starts running. The agency must conduct a reasonable reinvestigation free of charge and either record the current status of the item or delete it within 30 days. Within five business days of receiving your notice it must pass the dispute to the furnisher, including all relevant information you supplied — which is why attaching the document matters, and why a bare online tick-box dispute transmits so little.

The 30 days becomes 45 in two situations the CFPB spells out: where you disputed after receiving your free annual report, and where you provide additional relevant information during the original 30-day window. That second one is a genuine trade-off. Sending a further document on day 20 is often worth the extra fifteen days; sending it on day 28 as a nervous afterthought usually is not.

The outcome rule is the one worth memorizing. If the reinvestigation finds that an item cannot be verified, the agency shall promptly delete it from the file or modify it as appropriate. Verification is the furnisher's burden to satisfy, not yours to disprove. A furnisher that no longer holds the records — common with debt that has been sold two or three times — cannot verify, and the item comes off.

When the reinvestigation ends, the bureau has five business days to send you written notice of the results, a revised copy of your report at no cost, a description of the procedure it used, and notice of your right to add a statement to the file. The statute also lets you ask the agency to send notice of the deletion or the statement to businesses that recently received a report containing the item, which is the step to take when a specific lender's decision is at stake.

One escape hatch exists for the bureau. It may terminate a reinvestigation if it reasonably determines the dispute is frivolous or irrelevant — but it must tell you so in writing within five business days, give its reasons, and identify what information it needs from you to proceed. A frivolous determination is therefore not a dead end; it is usually a request for the specificity your first letter lacked.

The company that reported the item has its own duties under §1681s-2, quite apart from anything the bureau does. It may not furnish information it knows or has reasonable cause to believe is inaccurate. Once it discovers that something it reported is incomplete or inaccurate it must promptly notify the reporting agency, supply the correction, and stop furnishing the bad data. And where you have disputed accuracy with it directly, it may not keep reporting the item to bureaus without a notice that you dispute it.

That last obligation is quietly powerful. An account flagged as disputed is treated differently by many underwriting models, and the flag arrives from the furnisher rather than from your say-so. It only exists if you have actually put the dispute to the furnisher — which is the practical reason the CFPB tells you to write to both, rather than a mere belt-and-braces suggestion.

Regulation V, at 12 C.F.R. §1022.43, defines what a direct dispute to a furnisher covers. It reaches your liability for an account, including claims of identity theft, fraud or authorized-user status; the terms of the account such as type, balance, payment amount and credit limit; your performance on it, including payment status, payment dates and the dates the account was opened and closed; and any other information bearing on your creditworthiness. That is nearly everything that matters.

It also tells you what a furnisher does not have to entertain. Disputes about your identifying information, employer details, inquiries, public records such as judgments and bankruptcies, fraud or active duty alerts, or information sourced from a different furnisher may be treated as frivolous or irrelevant. So can a dispute submitted by a credit repair organization, or one that arrives without enough information to investigate. Take the identifying-information and public-record disputes to the bureau instead; the furnisher route will not serve you there.

The notice you send has to identify the account and yourself, state the specific information you dispute and the basis for disputing it, and include supporting documentation — Regulation V names police reports, affidavits, court orders and statements as examples. Send it to the address the furnisher designates for disputes if it has published one, and keep the certified mail receipt.

The furnisher must then investigate, review what you sent, and report the results to you within the same period the bureaus work to under section 611(a)(1) of the FCRA — generally 30 days. If it concludes the information was inaccurate, it must notify all the nationwide bureaus and modify, delete or permanently block the item from further reporting. That word "permanently" is the reason a furnisher-side win tends to stick where a bureau-side deletion sometimes does not.

A large share of disputes return the word "verified" with no explanation, and the item stays. That does not end the matter, and it should not be read as a finding that you were wrong. It means the furnisher, asked to check its records, reported back that its records say what they always said. Where the furnisher's records are the source of the error, the loop is closed and nothing has been examined.

So do not simply refile the same dispute. Identical resubmissions are what "frivolous or irrelevant" was written for, and they burn credibility you will want later. Change something material instead: add the document you did not attach, narrow the claim from "this account is wrong" to "the date of first delinquency is wrong and here is the statement showing it," or switch channels and put it to the furnisher directly under Regulation V if you had only gone to the bureau.

Use the results notice. Section §1681i entitles you to a description of the procedure the bureau used, and the reinsertion provisions require the agency to give you the furnisher's name, address and telephone number in the relevant notices. Asking what was actually done, and who was actually contacted, frequently reveals that the "investigation" consisted of transmitting a code and receiving one back. That answer is itself evidence if the matter escalates.

Know the reinsertion rule, because deletions are not always permanent. If an item is deleted after a dispute and the furnisher later wants it back, it may only be reinserted if the furnisher certifies that the information is complete and accurate — and the bureau must then notify you in writing within five business days, with the furnisher's contact details. If an item you had removed reappears without that notice, the notice failure is a distinct violation from whatever was wrong with the item.

Where the matter remains unresolved, exercise the statement right. The CFPB confirms you can require a brief statement of the dispute to be included in your file, and §1681i caps it at 100 words. It will not change a score, and it is genuinely useful in exactly one situation: when a human underwriter reads the file — a mortgage, a security clearance, a tenancy — and needs the two-line version of why the item is contested. Write it as a fact, not a grievance.

Then escalate. The CFPB's guidance on disagreeing with dispute results points to three routes in parallel: submit a complaint to the CFPB, contact your state attorney general because state law may give you more protection than federal law does, and consider legal help — an attorney, free community legal services, or for servicemembers the base legal assistance office. There is no requirement to pick one.

Medical collections have been the most unstable corner of credit reporting in recent years, and the SERP is full of confidently wrong answers written before the law moved. Here is the position as of this update. On 7 January 2025 the CFPB issued a final rule under Regulation V that would have barred consumer reporting agencies from including medical debt on credit reports and barred creditors from considering it. On 11 July 2025 the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas vacated that rule, holding that it exceeded the Bureau's statutory authority and was contrary to the FCRA.

The practical effect is that there is no federal prohibition on medical collections appearing in your file. They are consumer report items like any other, which means they carry exactly the same dispute rights as everything else on this page and exactly the same §1681c time limits. Separately from the vacated rule, the nationwide bureaus have operated their own voluntary policies on which medical collections they will show; those are business decisions rather than legal rights, so what you actually see on a report is the only reliable guide.

Because of that, the sequence for a medical item is different from an ordinary one. Verify the underlying bill before you dispute the tradeline. Request an itemized bill from the provider, confirm the claim was submitted to and processed by your insurer, and check whether the balance survives the plan's contracted rate. A very large share of medical collections trace back to a claim that was never filed, filed to the wrong plan, or filed and paid in part — in which case the tradeline is wrong because the debt is wrong.

If a collector rather than the provider is reporting, use the debt collection route in parallel. Demanding validation in writing puts the collector to proof of the amount and the creditor, and a collector that cannot validate has no business continuing to report. When the same balance is showing from both the hospital and its collection agency, that duplication is a straightforward completeness error under the FCRA regardless of the medical context.

Watch for the twin errors that turn one dispute into three. A medical account sold on to a debt buyer often reappears under a new name with a fresh reported date, which re-ages it under §1681c. And an account paid by an insurer after it was placed with a collector routinely stays open on the report for months, because the provider updated its own system and never told the collector, who never told the bureaus. Both are fixable, and both need the furnisher-side dispute rather than only the bureau one.

Where an account was opened by someone else in your name, the ordinary dispute process is the weaker of the two tools available to you. Section §1681c-2 gives victims of identity theft a blocking right with a far shorter fuse: the consumer reporting agency shall block the reporting of the information not later than four business days after it receives what the statute requires. Four business days, against 30 days for a reinvestigation, and the outcome does not depend on what the furnisher says.

The four things you must supply are set out in the section. Appropriate proof of your identity. A copy of an identity theft report. Identification of the specific information in your file that is fraudulent. And a statement from you that the information does not relate to any transaction by you. Assemble all four before you send anything; an incomplete package restarts the clock rather than starting it.

The identity theft report is the piece people get stuck on. IdentityTheft.gov, the FTC's reporting portal, is where you generate one. Do that first, because the report is the document that converts your account of events into something the statute recognizes, and a police report alone is often not accepted in its place. File the report before you write to the bureaus, not after.

Once a block is in place the agency must promptly notify the furnisher that the information may be the result of identity theft, that an identity theft report has been filed, that a block has been requested, and when the block takes effect. That notice is what stops the furnisher from continuing to report the item elsewhere, and it is why blocking reaches further than a deletion at a single bureau.

The block is not unconditional. Section §1681c-2 lets an agency decline or rescind it if it reasonably determines that the block was requested or granted in error, that the request rested on a material misrepresentation of fact by you, or that you obtained possession of goods, services or money as a result of the blocked transaction. That last limb is the one that catches informal arrangements — a relative who used your details with your knowledge is not identity theft, and asserting otherwise on a signed statement is a serious step.

Blocking is a remedy for what has already happened. Stopping the next account being opened is a separate exercise involving fraud alerts and a security freeze, and this site covers freezing in its own guide. If you are working through a wider identity theft — new accounts, a fraudulent tax return, benefits claimed in your name — the identity theft guide sets out the full recovery sequence, and the block described here is the credit-file component of it.

The CFPB complaint is the standard escalation and it is free. You can submit online in around ten minutes, or by phone on (855) 411-2372, Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm Eastern. Include a clear description of the problem, the important dates and amounts, what the company told you, and supporting documents — the CFPB accepts up to 50 pages. Attach the dispute letter, the certified mail receipt and the bureau's response; the paper trail is the whole case.

What happens next is defined. The CFPB routes the complaint to the company, or to another agency better placed to help. Most companies respond within 15 days; where a response is in progress, the company is expected to give its final resolution within 60 days. You then have 60 days to review and give feedback on the answer. The complaint itself is published in the public Consumer Complaint Database without identifying information, and the CFPB shares complaint data with state and federal agencies for supervision and enforcement.

File with your state attorney general as well. State credit reporting and consumer protection statutes sometimes give more than the federal floor — extra free reports, shorter deadlines, additional remedies — and the CFPB's own guidance directs you there for that reason. State attorneys general also take an interest in furnisher conduct in ways that produce results on individual files more often than the size of the office would suggest.

Be extremely careful with credit repair companies at this point, because the searches that lead here are exactly the ones they buy. The Credit Repair Organizations Act, at 15 U.S.C. §1679b, prohibits them from making untrue or misleading statements about your creditworthiness to a bureau or creditor, from advising you to make statements intended to alter your identification so as to conceal accurate, non-obsolete adverse information, from misrepresenting their services, and from engaging in any practice that amounts to fraud or deception.

The advance-fee ban is the bright line worth remembering. No credit repair organization may charge or receive any money or other valuable consideration for a service before that service is fully performed. A company asking for a setup fee or a monthly retainer up front is not operating within the statute, whatever its contract says. And §1679c requires it to give you, as a separate document before you sign, a written disclosure stating that you may dispute inaccurate information with a bureau yourself without paying a fee, and that neither you nor any credit repair company has the right to have accurate, current and verifiable information removed.

Suing is a real option rather than a rhetorical one. The CFPB confirms the right to bring an action, and that companies violating the FCRA can be liable for damages, attorney's fees and, where the violation is willful, punitive damages. That fee-shifting is why consumer attorneys take FCRA cases on contingency, and why a well-documented file — dated letters, certified mail receipts, the bureau's written results notice, evidence that a deleted item was reinserted without notice — is worth building even if you never intend to use it. Free community legal services and, for servicemembers, the base legal assistance office are the starting points if you cannot pay.