How Often Does Your Credit Score Update?

Your credit score is a major part of everyday life. It is often the deciding factor in getting a job, a loan for a car, or buying a home.

It’s important to know your credit score and how it works. You may have been working hard on improving your score, but the needle hasn’t budged.

This may lead you to wonder how often does your credit score update. Read on to find out the answer and learn what goes into your credit score and how to improve it.

How Does Your Credit Score Work?

Let’s start with a basic understanding of your credit score. Those three numbers are so important, you want to know how they’re put together.

The Credit Reporting Bureaus

The world of credit scores can be very confusing because there are so many different names and agencies. They’re all important and play a significant role in how your credit score is calculated.

Whenever you apply for a credit card or loan, it gets reported to three credit reporting agencies. Your payments also get reported to these bureaus, too.

What are they? You may have heard of TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian. You may have heard of Equifax thanks to that huge data breach a couple of years ago.

These companies collect data that make up your credit score. When you look at your credit report from each agency, you’ll see your past addresses and current address, your entire credit and payment history.

Any open and closed accounts will appear on these reports, and any late payments, accounts in collections, etc. Some publicly available information may appear on these reports too, such as tax liens on your property or any bankruptcies.

The Scoring Agencies

There are credit-scoring agencies that take the information on your credit report and turn it into the three magic numbers that make up your credit score.

The most well-known scoring agency is the Fair Isaac Corporation. This is the company that created the FICO score, which is used by the vast majority of lenders.

The other credit scoring agency is VantageScore. This is the collaboration between the three credit bureaus to provide some competition to the FICO score.

There are other credit scoring agencies, but these are the two that lenders will use to check your credit score.

How Often Does Your Credit Score Update?

When you check your credit score, you may see some variations between FICO and VantageScore. This is due to a couple of reasons.

The first is that each scoring agency weighs information differently to calculate your credit score. The second is that some information may not have updated.

How often is your credit score updated? Believe it or not, it’s not the fault of the credit bureaus if your score isn’t updated. It actually depends on your lender or credit card company.

They’re the ones who send your information to the credit reporting bureaus. The credit scoring agencies take the information from the credit bureaus to create your score.

You may have some accounts that don’t get reported to the credit agencies, such as a small loan. There’s no law or legal requirement that forces lenders and banks to submit your information.

Your score is reported because it’s an industry standard and it helps them and other banks to check your creditworthiness.

Some lenders may report your information immediately, while others do every 60 days. The vast majority of lenders will fall somewhere in the middle, reporting any updates once a month.

How long does it take for those changes to appear on your credit score? Almost right away. Once the credit bureaus get your information, they’re pretty quick to add it to your credit report.

It may take a few days for the changes to be reflected in your credit score.

Improving Your Credit Score

How can you improve your credit score? Even though FICO and VantageScore have different methods for calculating your score, some things are important in both calculations.

These are the things you want to focus on. Your credit utilization rate can make up a large portion of your credit score. This is the amount of credit you have and how much you use.

If you want to know how to fix your credit score, you’ll want to start by paying down your debt as much as possible.

Use Rapid Rescoring

Let’s say you’re in a situation where you worked hard to make improvements in your credit score because you want to buy a new home.

You just paid off a credit card, which brings down your credit utilization rate and should increase your credit score. Your credit card company has been slow to update that information and send it off to the credit bureaus.

You don’t want to miss out on your dream home because of slow reporting. Fortunately, you have one option that you can use. You can ask your lender to request Rapid Rescoring.

With this option, your lender asks for the updated information to be added to your credit report and rescore your credit. This should be enough to give you a much better chance at approval (and a better interest rate).

You can’t request Rapid Rescoring on your own. Only lenders can use this option, and it’s usually used in special situations, like the one shown here.

Make Your Credit Score Work for You

Your credit score affects so many different parts of your life. You want to make sure that your credit score has the most accurate and updated information to improve your chances to get approved for a loan.

How often does your credit score update? That’s an important question that depends largely on your lender or credit card company. When you work hard to improve your score, you want the changes to appear right away.

You can expect that it will take about a month for the changes to appear, though it may be sooner or later than that.

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