The default credit reporting agency, Equifax, offers free credit reports – but for how long can they truly remain free?
Equifax is one of the three credit reporting companies in the United States and according to law, any consumer is entitled to a free copy of their Equifax credit report once in twelve months. This guarantees consumers get to see their credit history for any incorrect entries that they may need to correct to improve their credit scores. But some people are probably thinking right now – but how long will this fee and service promotion last, how long will I be able to access my free Equifax credit report?
The offer of the free Equifax credit reports is possible due to the provisions of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act FCRA which state that all consumers have a right to obtain one free credit report from any of the three major credit reporting agencies Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion in any twelve months. This means that consumers are allowed to get an Equifax-free credit report at least once every year.
Some key things to know about this free access include:
To obtain a copy of your Equifax credit report, you may do so through the website AnnualCreditReport. com where you are allowed one free credit report after every 12 months. This is the only official site of the service that offers genuinely free credit reports which are due under federal law.
Your twelve-month period is the time frame starting from the last day you received your free annual Equifax credit report, not from the beginning of the year. For instance, if you requested your Equifax report from the website on March 1, 2020, then your next report will only be available starting March 1 st, 2021.
Within the twelve months you also have the option to order additional copies of your Equifax credit report or for a fee receive more current credit account information at Equifax. com or through other sources. However, while all three links claim to offer free credit reports, the actual website that provides them is AnnualCreditReport.com.
When one wants to access the free annual Equifax credit report through the AnnualCreditReport. com website they have the option of either ordering the Equifax credit report alone or ordering for Equifax credit report together with the Experian and TransUnion credit reports. All three of them only aggregate one report from each bureau in the 12 months.
There are some situations when Equifax does offer other options for consumers to get one or more additional free reports in certain circumstances such as being a victim of identity theft, being denied credit, employment, or insurance based on their report, or living in states where laws are more favorable to the consumer.
For most consumers, the issue is the only free Equifax credit report which can be obtained once a year through AnnualCreditReport. com only. Checking your e-mail and postal mail near your annual eligibility date is an opportunity to receive reminders regarding the need to check Equifax's credit report again for updates. Still, beyond having to buy other products, that open door once a year is all that Equifax is mandated to offer.
Therefore, to sum it all up, the free Equifax credit reports are effective for one year each starting from the date of the previous credit report. If your credit report has changed since the last time, you cannot obtain another free Equifax credit report from AnnualCreditReport. com until the next twelve-month period elapses. This right is provided by federal law to provide free access to your Equifax credit report at least once every 12 months, though there are some extra provisions involving the provision of copies only if the consumer can prove fraud or disputes with the credit reporting agency.
In any other circumstance, Equifax will not provide more than one free credit report that contains information about the most current status of your Equifax credit file to a customer during any one year’s time. Of course, there are other Equifax monitoring and scoring products available in the market that consumers interested in more frequent updates can purchase directly from Equifax and via some of the accessible lenders or other personal finance web resources. But you get the opportunity every year to view those same crucial aspects of your credit history with Equifax that lenders see when evaluating your creditworthiness, hence it is unlikely for major mistakes to slip through unnoticed.
So you need to remember the last date when you availed the free offer to get the note, so that after a year you do not lose your right to check your Equifax credit report again. This, in turn, translates to a certain improvement in the credit score in the long run provided that the mistakes are caught and rectified early enough. Once again, it would be unwise to go a whole year without viewing your free Equifax credit information.
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