How often does credit report change?

The credit report is continuous and can change within a few minutes. For example, if your credit report is requested by a lender right now and it is requested by another lender after an hour, then the credit report received by the first lender and the second lender may be different.

Credit report tends to change every time some new data about a person is given to the credit agencies. Thus, it can change just about every day.

It is important to understand that there is no credit report in the first place. This means that a credit report is prepared on the spot when it is requested by accessing the databases of the customers in the credit bureaus for information offered by different lenders and then all that stored information is compiled into a format and present in the form of a credit report. The credit report is thus a kind of a photo of your credit history at any particular period in time in your life.

The credit report thus bears information about the data that is present in the databases of the credit agencies at that specific time when a credit report is requested. Your credit report is not present until it is requested by a lender or you place a request for it.

It may however be noted that changes in the credit report does not happen in real time. It is not like a bank savings account where you deposit cash and the increase in your savings account gets reflected immediately in your bank account.

There are many lenders who tend to provide information to the credit bureaus on a daily basis. But it is not necessary that lenders generally tend to update customer information with the credit bureaus on a daily basis. Lenders have hundreds of thousands of customers and they may not necessary provide the information of all of their customers to the bureaus on a daily basis. Most of the lenders tend to pass on data about customers around the period of the client's billing cycle.

It is important to note that changes in the credit report do not occur only through information supplied by lenders. Data can also be suppressed or removed in the databases of the credit bureaus. As per state or federal law, some kinds of credit data have to be mandatorily removed after certain legal requirements are met. For instance, Chapter 13 bankruptcy has to be removed automatically from the credit report after a period of 7 years has elapsed since the date of filing Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Also, information that is really old also needs to be removed.

Credit scores can also change anytime like credit reports. Unlike the popular perception that credit scores are calculated, stored in a database, and changed from time to time, the fact of the matter is that even credit scores are calculated at the time of a request for it. The calculation is done on the basis of the customer credit information present in the database of the credit bureaus at the time of the request.