How long does it take for a credit report to update?

If you’re working hard to better your credit health, like paying down credit card balances or loans, you may be wondering when these positive actions will show up on your reports. Truthfully, there is no exact deadline or formula.

Your credit reports are updated when lenders provide new information to the nationwide credit reporting agencies for your accounts. This usually happens once a month, or at least every 45 days. However, some lenders may update more frequently than this. So, say you paid down a credit card recently. You may not see your account balance updated on your credit report immediately. If you look at the account in your TransUnion credit report, you may see a line that reads “Date Updated”. This would tell you the most recent day the account information was provided to TransUnion.

Because lenders don’t all provide updates on the same day, new information may be added to your reports quite frequently. You can get your credit report from each of the three nationwide credit reporting agencies weekly at annualcreditreport.com. If you’d like to more tools to help you manage your credit with confidence, consider a paid subscription to TransUnion Credit Monitoring. You’ll get access to daily credit report and score refreshes and alerts when there are changes to your accounts, helping you better keep track of important account changes.