The monthly fee that you already pay to live in your home could be doing more to help you.
For about 45 million families in the United States, rent is the biggest monthly expense, outpacing mortgage payments for homeowners. However, in most cases, the fact that they paid their rent every month doesn’t affect their credit scores.
This creates what consumer advocates describe as a “systemic oversight” in the way credit reports are handled. Information about mortgage payments, auto loan payments, credit card bills, and other accounts are automatically sent to the three main credit reporting agencies, while rent payments, the one bill that most renters are least likely to miss, are typically left out of the picture unless the renter takes action.
Historically, rent payments have not been included in the credit reports used by most mortgage lenders, but that changed in July 2025 when the Federal Housing Finance Agency allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to use VantageScore 4.0 in the mortgage underwriting process.
Unlike the FICO 8 scores typically used, VantageScore 4.0 takes rent payments into account. FHFA Director William Pulte described the decision as “a groundbreaking broadening of what can be considered a credit history.”
For renters who have been left out of the traditional credit reporting system, rent reporting can suddenly have an impact. But as we’ll explain below, it’s not all the same, as the type of credit score used, the type of rent reporting service, and whether or not the renter is likely to benefit or be harmed by the process can vary widely.
What Rent Reporting Looks Like
A Guide to Getting Rent on Your Credit Report
Rent payments won’t show up on your credit report without your help. While a bank might automatically report your mortgage or car loan payments, someone needs to tell the credit bureaus about your rent payments. This could be a third-party rent reporting agency, a property management company that uses a rent reporting program, or, rarely, your landlord.
Most renters who choose to report their payments will do so through a rent reporting service that they interact with directly, such as Self, Boom, or Rental Kharma.
These agencies verify your rent payments by using bank statements, canceled checks, or integration with property management systems. Once verified, the information is sent along to the credit bureaus, one, two, or all three of them, and will appear as a tradeline on your credit report.
Some agencies report only to one bureau while others will report to all three. Some will only report going forward while others allow you to report up to two years of past rent payments for an additional fee. For the renter, the service could be free, if the landlord or property manager foots the bill, or could cost anywhere from $10 to $20 per month.
The Difference Between Positive-Only and Full-File Reporting Services
Not all rent reporting services are the same, and one of the most important distinctions is between positive-only and full-file reporting services. Positive-only services, which include big names like Esusu and Self, will report your on-time payments to the credit bureaus but will not report any payments you miss or are late with. If you fall behind, they simply stop reporting payments at all, rather than including a delinquency.
Full-file reporting agencies, on the other hand, report everything. An on-time payment will help your credit score, but a late payment will hurt it. The National Consumer Law Center, one of the largest consumer advocacy groups in the U.S., has been among the most vocal about the dangers of full-file models.
“Full-file reporting threatens to bludgeon tenants who are already struggling, and can lead to housing insecurity, because late rent payments are especially devastating on tenant screening reports,” says Chi Chi Wu, director of consumer reporting advocacy for the organization.
For consumers who are considering rent reporting, the decision to use a positive-only service removes the downside risk: The worst that can happen with a positive-only model is that reporting will be paused during a bad month. That’s a very different proposition than having a 30-day late payment permanently placed on a credit report.
What the Data Actually Shows About Credit Score Impact
The Numbers Behind the Headlines
There’s evidence that rent reporting can indeed increase credit scores, and it comes from multiple, independent sources. One of the big three credit bureaus, TransUnion, found that 79% of renters who had payments reported saw an increase in their credit score, with an average improvement of 60 points under VantageScore 3.0. Among consumers with subprime credit, 41% saw a score increase of 10 or more points after just one month of reporting.
Perhaps the most robust evidence we have is from a 2025 randomized controlled trial by the Urban Institute, the first of its kind on rent reporting.
The study followed 269 renters across six subsidized housing properties, and found that positive-only rent reporting reduced the percentage of participants without a credit score by half, from 16% to 8%. It also found that, among those whose rent was reported, the percentage with near-prime VantageScores of 601 or above increased by 25 percentage points.
Esusu Financial, which currently operates in more than 5 million rental units across the country, says the average credit score improvement of renters on its platform is 53 points, as of late 2025. Esusu also says 12% of its renters moved from subprime to prime credit status solely as a result of rent reporting.
Who Benefits Most and Who Should Think Twice
The trend is clear across the studies. Rent reporting has the most marked impact on consumers who are credit invisible (they have no credit file at all) or who have thin files (they have very few existing tradelines). If you don’t have a credit score at all, for example, reporting 12 to 24 months of on-time rent payments can help you establish a scorable credit file almost overnight.
The impact is much more muted for consumers who already have established credit, with multiple existing accounts. If you already have a mortgage, two credit cards and an auto loan on your report, adding a rent tradeline to the mix is unlikely to make a big difference to your score.
In fact, in some cases, the addition of a new account can temporarily reduce your score, because it reduces the average age of the accounts in your credit file or changes the mix of credit you have. Consumers who aren’t able to pay rent on time every month should exercise caution.
Even with positive-only reporting, starting and stopping a tradeline can make you look like an inconsistent risk on your credit report. And consumers who sign up for a full-file service and fail to make a payment could very well end up with a late payment on their credit report, which will stay there for seven years.
The Scoring Model Problem Most Articles Don’t Discuss
Why FICO 8 Makes Rent Reporting Irrelevant for Most Lending Decisions
Here is the nuance most rent reporting articles gloss over or don’t mention at all.
FICO 8, which is used by about 90% of major lenders for credit cards, auto loans, and personal loans, does not consider rent payment data at all. Even if rent is on your credit report, FICO 8 doesn’t use it in the calculation. Someone paying $10 a month to report their rent might see their VantageScore go up while their FICO 8, which is what their credit card company actually uses, doesn’t budge.
The newer versions of FICO, including FICO 9, FICO 10, and FICO 10T, do use rent. Every version of VantageScore, including 3.0 and 4.0, considers rent as well. The problem is, lenders have been very slow to adopt the new versions.
Credit monitoring apps like Credit Karma show VantageScores, which causes some confusion. Someone might see their monitoring score go up 50 points when they start rent reporting and assume they’ll get better credit card offers as a result, only to find that doesn’t happen because the credit card company is still using FICO 8.
The July 2025 Policy Shift That Changes the Mortgage Equation
The most impactful news for rent reporting occurred in July 2025, when FHFA approved VantageScore 4.0 for mortgage underwriting by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. VantageScore 4.0 is the most rent-friendly credit scoring model around. It includes rent, utilities, and cell phone payments, and will score consumers with as few as one active account.
In a joint analysis by VantageScore and Esusu of over 600,000 renters, incorporating rent payments on time improved the model’s predictive performance by 11%.
Renters who scored 620 or higher with rent data had the same default rates as borrowers who scored 620 or higher without rent data, demonstrating that those consumers are truly creditworthy. An estimated 5 million more Americans will qualify for a mortgage because of this policy shift alone.
For people hoping to qualify for a mortgage, this means that rent reporting is more useful today than it was a year ago. For any other type of credit, the FICO 8 chasm remains the big issue.
The Risks That Come With Rent Reporting
When Rent Reporting Creates New Credit Report Problems
Rent reporting adds an entirely new category of information to credit reports, and anytime you’re adding new data, you’re introducing new potential for errors.
Between August 2023 and February 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received 10,960 consumer complaints about rental debt collection, including 1,697 complaints alleging false statements regarding rental debt. The existence of those complaints suggests the ecosystem for accurately reporting and managing rental data is still evolving.
At least one renter on a credit forum reported a surprise consequence of using a rent reporting service. Their debt-to-income ratio in Credit Karma went from 31% to 54% because rent showed up as a loan-type obligation on their credit report.
We also see this with individual consumers, such as one renter whose credit score dropped by 88 points when a reporting service switched from a lower to a higher tier, resulting in the removal and replacement of the original tradeline and the temporary loss of any history of on-time payments.
These are not outliers; they are representative of reporting errors and data issues that affect the credit reporting industry as a whole. And when errors happen, they are disputed like any other credit report error and must be resolved under the same rules as other credit report disputes under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Why Accuracy Monitoring Is Key
If you’re reporting your rent payments to the credit bureaus, you should monitor your credit reports from all three bureaus for accuracy.
The amount and date of each rent payment and the status of your account should match your records of rent payments. It’s not uncommon for discrepancies to occur between what a rent reporting agency reports and what actually ends up on your credit report, especially in the first few months you begin the service.
Under the FCRA, you have the right to dispute any information on your credit reports that you believe is inaccurate or can’t be verified. The credit bureaus have 30 days to investigate and verify disputed information and, if they can’t verify it, they must delete it from your credit reports.
This rule applies to all information on your credit reports, including rent tradelines and collection accounts. So if a rent reporting agency mistakenly places an error on your credit reports, or if your former landlord inaccurately reports that you were late with a payment, you don’t have to just accept the damage.
The same rules that apply to credit reporting errors also apply to rental information that’s reported to the credit bureaus. A credit report dispute attorney can help you review the accuracy of any rent-related tradeline on your credit reports and dispute any information that doesn’t meet FCRA guidelines.
Why Rent Reporting Matters Most to Those the Credit System Has Ignored
The Demographics of Credit Invisibility
Those who will benefit the most from rent reporting are also those who have been most failed by the traditional credit system.
A 2015 CFPB study found that 15% of Black or Hispanic consumers lack any credit history, compared to just 9% of white consumers. And when you include consumers whose credit files are not scorable, that number rises to around 28% for Black consumers and 27% for Hispanic consumers, compared to 16% for white consumers.
Research by the Urban Institute found that in neighborhoods where the majority of residents are Black, the median credit score for millennials (ages 25 to 29) is 582 compared to a median score of 687 for majority-white neighborhoods. That 105-point credit score disparity can have major implications for loan and credit approvals, interest rates, insurance premiums and employment screening.
Rent reporting can’t erase the disparity entirely, but it is one of the few solutions that directly addresses the way the disparity is maintained.
A Structural Problem Requiring a Structural Remedy
Esusu co-founder and CEO Wemimo Abbey, who testified before Congress on the issue of rent reporting, put it this way: “More than 90% of renters are not being rewarded for paying their rent on time and are being denied access to credit. The current financial system assumes consumers are guilty until proven innocent; you have to go into debt in order to prove your creditworthiness.”
If you’ve ever tried to establish credit from scratch, you know how that feels. The Catch-22 of building credit means you need credit to get credit.
For many renters, immigrants, youth, and those who have simply avoided credit, rent reporting provides an alternative. But only if it’s accurate and only if the right scoring models incorporate it. For consumers in any of these groups, rent reporting can be a useful tool as part of a comprehensive credit-building plan.
However, it is no replacement for ensuring the information already on your credit report is accurate. Collection accounts, charge-offs, and other negative items that should not be on your report or are unverifiable continue to harm your score no matter how many positive tradelines you add.
Conclusion
The Bottom Line on Rent Reporting
Rent reporting is real and can help improve credit scores, especially for credit invisible or thin-file consumers.
The data from TransUnion, the Urban Institute, and individual platforms all show that, for the right candidates, rent reporting can lead to significant credit score gains. The July 2025 approval of VantageScore 4.0 for mortgage underwriting means rent reporting is more relevant than it has ever been.
But rent reporting is no panacea. It does nothing for your FICO 8 score that most non-mortgage lenders still use. It introduces new data that, like any other, can be flawed. Full-file reporting comes with significant downside risk for any renter who misses a payment. And for those who already have credit history established, the benefit is usually minimal.
More importantly, adding positive information to your credit report does nothing to address the negative effects of inaccurate negative information.
A collection account that should not be on your report, a charge-off that was not reported correctly, or a debt that you have already paid but still shows a balance will continue to drag your score down no matter how many months of rent payments you add on top.
Protecting Your Credit Report Is the Priority
Before you spend any time or money on rent reporting, you should make sure your credit report is otherwise free of errors and inaccuracies.
Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), you have the legal right to dispute any information on your report that is inaccurate, incomplete, or unverifiable. The burden is on collection agencies and original creditors to verify the information they report. If they cannot, it must be deleted.
If you have collection accounts, charge-offs, or other negative items on your credit report that you believe may be inaccurate or unverifiable, you should prioritize getting those removed first. In most cases, the removal of a single unverifiable collection account will result in a greater score improvement than you could achieve with months of rent reporting.
The specialists at FightCollections.com focus on identifying and disputing exactly these kinds of credit report errors on behalf of our clients. Rent reporting and credit report accuracy are not mutually exclusive strategies. They can and often should be used in tandem.
But the first step in any credit improvement plan must always be to ensure your credit report is clean and accurate. If collection agencies have placed items on your report that should not be there, begin with a free credit report review at FightCollections.com to explore your options under federal law.
