How to get your credit score for free

Knowing your credit score and how to improve it is very important. Your credit score affects how you get credit and at what cost. It affects the interest rate on your mortgage, auto loan, credit card and even the amount of security deposit you have to pay when you rent an apartment. Having a poor credit score means you’ll pay more for a lot of things. The three credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion) wants you to buy your credit score and their credit monitoring service but you can get those for free too.

Following two provide a montly credit score update and notify you of any changes in your credit report for free. I use both of the because they pull their data from different credit bureaus and their score is most of the time different but still fairly close which gives an idea what your score is at any given time.

These two also provide free score but they update very infrequently:

myFico.com is a subscription service but it does have free trial so if you cancel the subscription right after getting your score it’s free and it’s the only way I know to get Equifax score for free.

In addition to getting your score you have a right to get a free credit report once per year from all three credit bureaus. You can get that by heading to AnnualCreditReport.com.