Credit scores and your credit file
Your credit file is a record of how you've handled borrowing and bills. A credit score is somebody's opinion of your credit worthiness. A lender reads the record and forms its own.
Your credit file is kept by four companies, not one
Experian, Equifax, TransUnion and Crediva each keep a file on you, and they don't always match.
These are the credit reference agencies. Lenders send them details of your accounts and how you've paid, and look you up when you apply for credit. Not every lender reports to every agency, so the four files can say slightly different things.
What's on it is about borrowing and bills, not about you as a person
Your accounts and how you've paid them, plus a few public records. Not your salary.
Example · made up · not a real person
Credit file: Sam Example
What one of the four agencies might hold
Accounts, and the last 12 months
Credit card
Limit £1,500 · balance £640
Paid on time 11 months, late once in January
Overdraft
Arranged limit £500 · used most months
In order all 12 months
Car finance (hire purchase)
£214 a month · 22 of 48 paid
Paid on time all 12 months
paid on time paid late — stays up to six years
Other things on the file
- Electoral register
- Yes, current address
- Linked to
- Alex Example (joint account)
- Court judgments, bankruptcy
- None
- Fraud markers
- None
Searches
- Hard: a car finance application, March
- Lenders see this
- Soft: Sam checked their own file, June
- Only Sam sees this
Not on any credit file: Sam's salary, Sam's student loan, any criminal record.
Your salary isn't on it, and nor is any criminal record. Nor is your student loan, which is one of the ways it's unlike other borrowing. When a lender wants to know what you can afford, it asks, and the figure that matters is the money that reaches your bank, which Take-home pay explains.
A missed payment stays on your file for up to six years
So does a default. After six years, they drop off.
That's the long tail of a single missed payment, and it's why the lenders' records matter more than any number an app shows you. It works the other way too: on-time payments are most of what a file records, month after month.
Looking at your own file doesn't count against you
Checking your own file is a soft search. Lenders can't see it.
There are two kinds of search. A soft search happens when you check your own file, or when a lender's eligibility checker gives you an idea of your chances before you apply. Lenders can't see soft searches, and they don't affect your score.
A hard search happens when you actually apply for credit. Other lenders can see it, it can affect your score, and it can stay on your file for up to two years. Each application leaves one, so several close together are visible to the next lender who looks.
You can see all four files, free
By law, every agency has to give you your statutory credit report for nothing.
Look for "statutory report" on each agency's own website. Monthly subscriptions are optional; nobody has to sign up for one to see their file. MoneyHelper's guide goes through it.
If something on a file is wrong, you can raise it with the agency, or with the lender that supplied it. If it still isn't put right, you can add a short statement to your file explaining your side (a Notice of Correction), and complain to the ICO, the regulator for personal information.
There's no single credit score
Each lender judges you by its own rules. The number in an app is one company's estimate.
The agencies turn your file into a number, and so do apps built on top of them. It's a rough guide to how your file looks. But a lender doesn't decide on that number. It reads your file, adds what you tell it on the application, and applies its own criteria, which differ from lender to lender and from one kind of borrowing to another.
So a "good" score doesn't guarantee a yes, and one lender can turn you down while another says yes on the same file. I don't name the score apps, for the same reason I don't name lenders: many of them earn money when you take out credit.
A few things help, and none of them is a trick
Being on the electoral register, paying on time, and not applying for lots at once.
Being on the electoral register helps a lender confirm your address; MoneyHelper calls it an easy way to improve your score. Paying on time is what most of a file is made of. And because each application leaves a hard search, fewer applications leave fewer marks.
A file with very little on it isn't a bad file. It just gives a lender less to go on.
This page can't tell you what's on your file
Your four free reports can. Only a lender can tell you what it will decide.
I can explain how files work. What's on yours is in the reports, and what a lender makes of it is the lender's call, by its own rules.
How credit files work from MoneyHelper; free reports and correcting mistakes from the ICO. Facts last checked October 2026. I check them every month, to catch rates and rules that change.