Understanding Your Experian Credit Report

At the top of your credit report is your personal information such as name, gender, other names, driver’s license, date of birth, employer and known addresses.

Your Experian Credit Score shows you how things are tracking at a glance. Your Experian Credit Score is a number between 0 and 1,000. The red boxes under “Your Credit Summary” give an indication of the negative factors that could be impacting your score. Information about defaults and overdue payments can be found further down the report.

This section provides information about current open accounts such as with credit providers and debt collection agencies that do not currently provide repayment history.

You will find information here about any applications you’ve made for credit in the last five years as well as the name of the organisation you applied to. This section doesn’t state whether your application for credit was successful, declined or accepted by you. These are purely enquiries / applications made by you.

You will see information about the payments you’ve made in the last two years that have been reported by your credit providers to Experian. It’s worth noting that not all of your credit providers will report your repayment history to us. Green ticks show you’ve made payments for that month on time and a number denotes the missed payments for that month. If you’re more than seven months behind only seven is shown.

Here you can find out more about the defaults mentioned earlier in your Experian Credit Report, including how much you owe / owed when the account defaulted and the status of the default. For example P = Paid or S = Settled.

The information here will show details of any circumstances where any of your credit providers believes:

• You have committed or attempted fraud in the way you have applied for credit or
• You have fraudulently evaded meeting your credit obligations or
• Your actions indicate you don’t intend to comply with your credit obligations and they’ve tried unsuccessfully to contact you about this over six months ago

This section shows the information about applications you have made for credit as well as your past and current credit relationships that are for your business use such as a business credit card or trade credit account.

This section of your credit report gives information that is publicly available about your financial situation, including information about whether you’ve been made bankrupt or have had an successful court actions taken against you.