Demonstration site. Uptick Credit is a fictional business built to show a design system; the registration numbers, staff and sample files are placeholders. Nothing here is legal or financial advice.
You can dispute credit report items yourself, for free. Start with your free reports at annualcreditreport.com — then read our do-it-yourself guide, which costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Credit education
Written to be read once and remembered, not to rank for a keyword. If they answer your question and you never contact us, the page has done its job.
FICO and VantageScore, why they disagree, the five factors and what each one is really measuring.
Where the number comes from, why the statement date matters more than the due date, and the per-card trap.
Which pulls are scored, how rate-shopping windows work, and the two-year versus one-year distinction.
When the clock starts, why re-ageing is illegal, and why paying a collection may not remove it.
The short version
Almost every question about credit resolves into “which of these five am I actually touching, and how heavy is it?” Two of them are two-thirds of the answer.
Whether you paid on time, and how badly you did not.
The largest single input. A payment reported 30 days late costs more than one reported 29 days late costs nothing, because the furnisher only reports at 30. Recency and severity both matter: a 90-day late from four years ago weighs less than a 30-day late from last month.
Lever: Bring every open account current, then keep it current. Nothing else in this list outranks that.
Mostly revolving utilisation — what you owe against your limits.
Utilisation is measured per card and across all cards, and it is calculated from the balance your issuer reports on the statement date, not the balance after you pay. This is why people who pay in full every month can still show 70% utilisation.
Lever: Pay before the statement closes, not just before the due date. This is the fastest lawful lever on the list.
The age of your oldest account and the average age of all of them.
Closing an old card does not immediately delete its history — a closed account in good standing can keep reporting for around ten years — but it does remove its limit from your utilisation the moment it closes.
Lever: Keep the oldest card open and put one small recurring charge on it. Time is the only other input.
Recent hard inquiries and recently opened accounts.
A hard inquiry stays on the report for two years but is generally only scored for one. Rate shopping for a mortgage or a car within a short window is usually treated as a single inquiry by the scoring model; applying for four credit cards in a month is not.
Lever: Space out applications. Do not open new accounts in the ninety days before a mortgage application.
Whether you have both revolving and instalment accounts.
The smallest factor and the one most oversold. It is not worth taking on a loan you do not need in order to improve it.
Lever: Effectively none worth pulling on its own. It improves as a by-product of normal borrowing.
Weights are FICO’s published approximations for the general population. Your own file may weight them differently — someone with a thin file leans harder on length of history, and a recent serious delinquency dominates everything else.
| Factor | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Payment history | 35% | Whether you paid on time, and how badly you did not. |
| Amounts owed | 30% | Mostly revolving utilisation — what you owe against your limits. |
| Length of credit history | 15% | The age of your oldest account and the average age of all of them. |
| New credit | 10% | Recent hard inquiries and recently opened accounts. |
| Credit mix | 10% | Whether you have both revolving and instalment accounts. |
Six things that are not true
Checking your own credit lowers your score.
It does not. Your own check is a soft inquiry and is never scored. Only an application you made can produce a hard inquiry.
Closing a card you do not use helps.
It usually hurts. Closing removes that card’s limit from your utilisation the same day, and eventually removes its age from your average.
You need to carry a balance to build credit.
You do not. Paying in full every month builds history exactly as well and costs no interest. This myth is expensive.
Paying a collection removes it.
Usually not. It changes the status to paid, which some newer models treat more kindly, but the entry generally reports for its full seven years.
There is one credit score.
There are dozens, across two families and three bureaus. A lender sees one of them, and it is often not the one your app shows you.
A credit repair company can remove anything.
No company can lawfully remove accurate, current, verifiable information. Any claim otherwise is a reason to end the call.
Definitions
Most of the confusion in this category is vocabulary doing work it should not be doing. These are the terms that come up on almost every call.
Required notice
You have the right to dispute inaccurate information in your credit report yourself, at no cost, by contacting the consumer reporting agency directly. Nothing we do requires a fee to be effective. Everything on this page is a right you already hold under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Get your free reports from the only federally authorised source: annualcreditreport.com. Do not pay a site that charges for them, and do not use a lookalike domain.
Our free do-it-yourself guide is the same process we run for clients, written out in full: how to read the file, what a dispute must contain, the addresses, the statutory windows, and what to do when a bureau answers “verified”. It asks for no email address and sells nothing.
Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 U.S.C. §1681i and §1681j(a).
Next step
Two paths. One of them costs nothing and always will. We would rather you took that one and did not need us.
Free · no account, no email
The whole process written out: how to pull all three reports at no cost, what a dispute letter needs to contain, the statutory windows, and what to do when a bureau says “verified”.
Open the guidePaid · billed after the work
A line-by-line read of all three files and a written plan, at no charge and with no obligation. If there is nothing worth disputing we will tell you that, and the review still costs nothing.
Start a file review