What Are the 3 Credit Reporting Agencies
The three national credit reporting companies are Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. They are private businesses that compile consumer credit files and sell reports and scores to lenders and other permissible users. They are separate from the government, and consumers can obtain free reports from all three at AnnualCreditReport.com.
In the United States, the three national credit reporting companies are Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. They are private, for-profit businesses rather than government agencies or regulators. Each maintains a separate database of consumer credit files covering roughly the same national population, which is why they are often described together as the three nationwide consumer reporting agencies. The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act defines a consumer reporting agency as an entity that regularly assembles or evaluates consumer information for the purpose of furnishing consumer reports to third parties, and the three national companies operate within that framework.
The core function of each company is to collect account and payment information furnished by creditors, along with certain public record data and information supplied by debt collectors, and to organize it into an individual consumer file. When a lender, landlord, insurer, or employer with a permissible purpose requests information, the company packages that data into a credit report. Credit scores are a related but distinct product: the widely used FICO and VantageScore models are developed by separate companies, and the credit reporting companies apply those models to the file data they hold, or sell their own scoring products built on similar inputs.
Federal law gives consumers the right to a free file disclosure from each of the nationwide consumer reporting agencies once during a twelve-month period. Those requests are made through AnnualCreditReport.com, the centralized service the three companies jointly operate, rather than through each company's own marketing site. Because the three files are maintained independently, a report from one company is not a substitute for a report from another. A creditor may furnish data to a single company, to two, or to all three, and the timing of updates and the outcome of disputed items can differ from one file to the next.
Beyond the three national companies, many other consumer reporting agencies operate in narrower markets, including tenant screening, employment background checks, checking account history, and insurance underwriting. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publishes a list of such companies. Oversight of consumer reporting is shared among federal and state authorities: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau enforces the Fair Credit Reporting Act for larger participants, the Federal Trade Commission enforces it for many other entities, and state attorneys general can also bring actions. None of these agencies maintains consumer credit files itself.