CheckDispute Guides

Why your three credit reports may look different CheckDispute · Sources checked September 20, 2026 Your three credit reports can look different because each nationwide credit bureau collects information from different sources, so one bureau's report may not be completely the same as the other two. A difference between two reports is ordinary, and on its own it does not establish that either report is wrong. This guide shows you how to set two reports side by side, which fields to compare on a single account, and what a mismatch does and does not prove — so that if you do write something down, it names an account, a field, a value and a date. Are all three of your credit reports supposed to be the same? No. You hold three separate files at three separate companies, and they were never assembled from one shared feed. The FTC, in its guidance on free credit reports , answers the question directly: because each credit bureau may get its information from different sources, the infor...

Credit report versus credit score: what each tells you CheckDispute · Sources checked September 20, 2026 A credit report is a dated record of your credit accounts and credit activity, held by a credit reporting company. A credit score is a three-digit number that a scoring model calculates from the information in a report. The difference that matters when something looks wrong is this: the report is a document with named fields you can compare against your own paperwork and ask to have corrected; the score is an output of that document. This guide shows what each one can tell you, and which of the two gives you something to point at. Does your credit report include your credit score? Usually not. USAGov states plainly that in most cases your credit report will not include your credit score , and the CFPB says the free credit reports provided by the nationwide credit reporting agencies currently do not include free credit scores . That is not an oversight in how the reports are asse...