How to Self-Report Good Information to Credit Bureaus

In a world where so much can be shared, self-reporting your good information to the credit bureaus – Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion – isn’t allowed. However, there are programs that you can use to try to add rent, utility bills, and more to your credit reports.

That said, neither the financial information they track is universally used by the three main three credit bureaus, nor are lenders necessarily pulling versions of your credit score that incorporate the information.

Let’s begin with an understanding of the types of financial activity that are reported to the three credit agencies. They include recurring payments made for mortgages, credit cards, car loans, student loans, and similar types of debt. However, payments for utilities, such as electricity, cable, internet, phone, and water, typically aren’t reported – unless a payment is missed. The same applies to rental payments, as well as positive information about your bank accounts, such as your ability to consistently maintain a healthy balance.

Assuming these bills are consistently paid on time, think about how that may help boost your credit score.

While you can’t self-report on utility and rental payments, you can work with services that track and report such information to the credit agencies on your behalf. Let’s take a look at two, both of which are free.

Experian Boost^®: Sign up, link your checking account, and Experian will comb through your bank statements to track and report on-time utility payments, cell-phone payments, and even monthly auto-payments. Experian Boost has the potential to improve your Experian FICO^® Score 8 credit score.¹

UltraFICO^®: With this service, FICO monitors checking accounts, savings accounts, and money market deposit accounts to determine an UltraFICO score. According to UltaFICO, by linking with your checking, savings or even money market accounts, your UltraFICO Score could improve your FICO Score based on indicators of sound financial behavior.²

Paying rent on time is a clear sign of financial responsibility, but that information typically isn’t reported to the three credit agencies – and can’t be self-reported, either. The credit agencies will, however, accept rental payment history reported via rent-reporting services, some of which are free, while others require an enrollment and/or installment fee plus monthly payments for the forwarding of financial information.

Rent-reporting services typically require a landlord to use a payment platform that forwards records to a credit bureau. Signing up may be worthwhile if you expect to move to another rental. Attaching a credit report that shows your track record of on-time rental payments to a new lease application could help to demonstrate your reliability to a potential landlord.

However, not all credit scoring models factor in all the information sent to the credit bureaus. That applies to rental information. While FICO^® Score 9 (a version of the scoring model) does incorporate rental information from a credit report, most businesses rely on FICO 8, which does not. And mortgage lenders tend to use an even older version.

In other words, your rental record isn’t likely a factor in the FICO credit scores businesses use to evaluate creditworthiness. However, VantageScore^®, which is a joint scoring system developed by the three credit bureaus, does incorporate rent information.