How Public Records Impact Your Credit Score? (2024)

FAQs

How does a public record affect your credit score? ›

If a public record gets added to your report, there's a good chance it could damage your credit scores and make it more difficult to qualify for new loans or credit cards in the future.

Payment History: 35%

Making debt payments on time every month benefits your credit scores more than any other single factor—and just one payment made 30 days late can do significant harm to your scores. An account sent to collections, a foreclosure or a bankruptcy can have even deeper, longer-lasting consequences.

Payment History: 35%

Your payment history carries the most weight in factors that affect your credit score, because it reveals whether you have a history of repaying funds that are loaned to you.

While the general public can't see your credit report, some groups have legal access to that personal information. Those groups include lenders, creditors, landlords, employers, insurance companies, government agencies and utility providers.

It can definitely impact the chances of whether or not you get a loan. Even some people who haven't had credit for a considerable length of time can still have a high FICO Score if the rest of their credit report looks good. A longer credit history will always have a positive effect on FICO Scores.

Lenders also use these five Cs—character, capacity, capital, collateral, and conditions—to set your loan rates and loan terms.

Highlights: Even one late payment can cause credit scores to drop. Carrying high balances may also impact credit scores. Closing a credit card account may impact your debt to credit utilization ratio.

Your credit reports reveal your payment history, or whether you've consistently paid bills and other obligations on time. FICO says payment history accounts for 35% of your score. VantageScore says payment history counts for 40% of its 3.0 scoring model.

It's possible that you could see your credit scores drop after fulfilling your payment obligations on a loan or credit card debt. Paying off debt might lower your credit scores if removing the debt affects certain factors like your credit mix, the length of your credit history or your credit utilization ratio.

What 3 things can cause a low credit score? ›

Making a Late Payment

Every late payment shows up on your credit score and having a history of late payments combined with closed accounts will negatively impact your credit for quite some time. All you have to do to break this habit is make your payments on time.

FICO^® Scores consider a wide range of information on your credit report. However, they do not consider: Your race, color, religion, national origin, sex and marital status.

Public records could stay on your credit for the better part of a decade. Even if you repay the money you owe, public records with negative information typically remain on your credit reports for seven to 10 years. Public records with adverse information may even occasionally wind up on your credit reports by mistake.

You can remove public records from your credit report by filing a dispute with the three major credit bureaus. Public records are not listed on credit reports anymore, after the bureaus changed their policy in 2018 in response to new regulations.

A derogatory mark on a credit report refers to a negative item such as a late payment, a loan default, a repossession, or a foreclosure. In short, it communicates that you didn't follow through on one of your payment agreements.

In this example, the number one reason the credit score is not higher is “SERIOUS DELINQUENCY, AND PUBLIC RECORDS OR COLLECTION FILED.” That means the consumer has at some point had a delinquency on an account or a collection filed on an account that is still effecting their credit score.