Canada: What's the Difference Between a Credit Report and Credit Score?



The short answer: Your credit report has just details about open and closed credit lines (ie: credit cards, lines of credit, mortgages, and sometimes unpaid bills), but no score.

Your score is a calculation of your credit-worthiness given as a number with no other details. This is the number that a bank will use as one of many factors to determine whether you're eligible for credit, and at what rate.  

In Canada, you can get your report for free with my guide here. Keep in mind that there are two credit bureaus, Equifax and Transunion, and it's best to get both, since lenders may not report to both, or may pull records from both. Both bureaus give out reports for free by mail.

To get your score, you have to pay for it. The score can change too. How the score is calculated is proprietary, and may be slightly different between the two bureaus. Sometimes people will get their scores monthly to see how they improve or worsen, but it's really just better to do what you can to make your report and credit-worthiness better, it's not rocket-science. Looking at the score itself may lead to disappointment when it doesn't go up as much as you think it would, but since nobody really knows exactly how it's calculated, you'd be getting disappointed over nothing.

My guess is, with computers being as big and powerful as they are these days, that credit scores are based on everything in a credit report, and since credit bureaus have so much data in their repositories, they throw it all at a computer based on previous outcomes, and predicts who is likely to default based on what is already known, and assigns a score based on all of that. If it doesn't work that way, it one day will, since computers are better at dealing with this magnitude of data than people are.

Sometimes a lender, when they pull your credit report, could let you know what your credit score is, but I believe they're not supposed to disclose this, I imagine it would have to do with their agreement with the bureaus.

pulling credit score

does anyone know if it is bad to pull your credit score too much ?

and is there any way to fix the score?

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