How Long Does It Take To Get A Credit Report?
Getting a copy of your credit report is among the measures that can help a person take care of his or her financial state. Your credit reports are records consisting of your payment history, the amounts you owe, the credit limits, recent account inquiries, and others. This information is then used to compute your credit scores; the scores lenders use to assess your creditworthiness each time you apply for an account such as a credit card or loan.
The three major consumer reporting agencies include Equifax, Experian, and Transunion, and there are several models for scoring the reports, and therefore consumers have questions about how long it will take to get the reports. Of course, we have unveiled what to anticipate in the following sections.
How Much Time Does It Take to Obtain a Credit Report Online?
The quickest method to obtain a free copy of a credit report is to use the official website of the AnnualCreditReport. com. This site offers one credit report to consumers from each of the three credit bureaus annually for free. This means that the site is allowed by federal law to offer these free reports.
You must always select the credit report type you want and have the credit report you selected ready for you within minutes of applying it online at AnnualCreditReport. com. Nevertheless, there could be some unavoidable circumstances such as server problems or congestion that make it take up to another three business days to access the report.
While ordering the report online is faster, if you wish to order the reports through the phone or by mail then there might be some delay with AnnualCreditReport. com. To request by mail you have to download a form, complete it, send it through the post, and then wait again for delivery of the form. Reports requested by phone also require more time to be completed than if they were produced through the site’s real-time online fulfillment. However, such methods allow reports to be processed within the 5-10-day period on average.
Other online credit report services can take less than 5 minutes to provide credit reports though the duration may vary depending on the type of credit report requested.
Apart from using the website AnnualCreditReport. com which was created by the federal government to provide one free credit report every year, consumers can obtain credit reports and scores from many other consumer reporting agencies on the internet. Currently, Equifax, Experian, and Transunion among the leading credit bureaus offer a facility for viewing credit reports online.
For instance, Experian has a notice that informs the client that he or she can see a credit report online as soon as he or she signs up for a monthly subscription. Equifax also offers the option to check Equifax credit reports for free online whenever after creating an account. Transunion also releases credit reports once a subscription payment is made.
But consumers also have a choice of using independent credit monitoring services like Credit Karma and IdentityForce that offer the consumer free online access to credit reports from TransUnion and Equifax. These sites provide the ability to generate reports with relative ease and much of the time, a report can be completed in mere seconds after creating an account.
Some of these sites allow you instant access to your credit report and this is something that is popular and which can be done in a very short time. But some of these websites are full of advertisements or offer the consumers to pay for the credit features while the free AnnualCreditReport. com site offers the reports that are mandated by the federal government free of cost and without any hook.
Long time it takes to retrieve credit reports from credit bureaus
If you apply for a copy of your credit report directly through the credit reporting agencies, then the time taken will differ as indicated below. But in most cases, it only takes one to seven business days before you have access to it.
Equifax encourages customers to get a copy of their Equifax credit report within one business day from the time Equifax receives your order. It is that for the given type of processing, it may take two to five days. Thus, Equifax reports are available to most consumers in three to six business days in total in case consumers order them directly.
Experian also provides averages of one – three business days in which a credit report ordered online can be fulfilled together with five – seven business days in which a credit report ordered offline can be fulfilled. Any kind of report from Experian also takes approximately a week or so to place an order.
TransUnion also provides an estimated processing time of 3-5 working days for internet orders and 5-10 working days for those ordered by phone or mail. Include the real delivery time and your free TransUnion report should appear in your account or be delivered by post within a week, too.
The main flaw of direct ordering from the credit bureaus is that it only provides a report from that specific bureau. While at AnnualCreditReport. com you can get all three reports fast On the other hand, AnnualCreditReport. com gathers all the reports and makes it easier for you to compare all the information.
How Long It Takes to Get a Free Annual Credit Report through Mail?
Consumers who want to use the method of requesting free annual credit reports by post may fill in the request form of Annual Credit Report Request Service which operates at AnnualCreditReport. com. This takes about two to three weeks in total to get reports from all three credit bureaus.
It may take several days for your mailed form to reach the processing center; consider 3 to 5 business days. Shipping time is commonly estimated to be between three to five business days. The time taken to send the mail back to the consumer is between five to 10 working days. Therefore, by including transit in its calculation, paper requests mean that one gets access to annual free reports in about 15-25 days.
It is advisable to check your important credit-related information at least once a year. Credit reports are easily accessible within a few minutes or in the worst case a few days due to the readily available links in AnnualCreditReport. com and other related websites. These important reports reflecting financial reputation can be received through even the most traditional method of postal mail within a week. As we all understand, it is much easier to manage credit if one takes time to check the report frequently.
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