Protect your credit

A property manager telling you to freeze your credit is telling you to block a property manager. That is the honest shape of this page. A frozen file cannot be pulled by us either, and an application that comes back as "unable to verify" is an application that gets set aside while someone else takes the unit.

We think you should freeze it anyway, and then lift it deliberately when you apply. The alternative is leaving your file open to anyone who asks, permanently, on the chance that you might apply for something one day. That is not a trade worth making, and the lifting takes an hour.

Why renters are exposed more than most people

A mortgage application happens once a decade. A rental application happens every time you move, and in a competitive market you may file four or five for one apartment. Each one asks for your full Social Security number, your date of birth, your current address and your employer.

Those applications go to many different places. Some landlords use a national screening company. Some use a local one. Some use a spreadsheet and a filing cabinet in an office above a shop. You usually cannot tell which from the form, and you have already handed the number over by the time you find out.

None of that is a reason not to apply. It is a reason to make your credit file useless to anyone who obtains those details and tries to open an account with them.

What a freeze is, and what it is not

• A security freeze blocks new creditors from seeing your file, so an application in your name cannot be approved. It is free, it is federal law, and it does not expire until you remove it.
• It does not affect your credit score, and it does not stop you using cards or accounts you already have.
• It is not the same as a credit lock. Locks are products the bureaus sell, sometimes bundled with monitoring you pay for. The freeze is the one written into law. Ask for the freeze.
• It is not a fraud alert. An alert asks lenders to verify your identity; a freeze stops them seeing the file at all. Alerts now last one year and are also free.

Free freezes for everyone in every state came in on 21 September 2018, under the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, which amended the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Anyone charging you for one is selling you something else.

Freezing it: three separate jobs

There is no single switch. The three nationwide bureaus hold three separate files and you must contact each one. Doing two out of three leaves the third open, and a lender only needs one.

It is free, by federal law. Placing a freeze, lifting it temporarily and removing it altogether all cost nothing, at every bureau, for everyone. That is the Fair Credit Reporting Act as amended in 2018. Anyone charging you is selling a product, not the freeze.

Before you start, have these to hand

• Your full legal name, including any suffix
• Social Security number and date of birth
• Current address, and every address for the past two years
• An email address and a phone that can receive a code

Each bureau then asks questions drawn from your own file — a former address, a lender you have borrowed from, a payment amount. If it cannot place you, it falls back to documents by post. Set aside twenty minutes for all three; you will usually be done in ten.

The three, in any order

• Equifax — equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-freeze · 1-888-298-0045
• Experian — experian.com/help/credit-freeze · 1-888-397-3742
• TransUnion — transunion.com/credit-freeze · 1-800-916-8800

Type those in rather than searching. The results for “credit freeze” carry paid advertisements for monitoring subscriptions, and the free statutory freeze is not the thing being sold.

Keep what each one gives you. Equifax and TransUnion issue a PIN or an account; Experian now runs it through a free online account rather than the PIN it once required. Losing the credential does not lose you the freeze, but it turns a one-hour lift into a phone call and an identity check on the afternoon you are trying to sign a lease.

If the website cannot verify you

It happens, most often to people who have moved recently or have a thin file. Each bureau takes the request by post instead, with copies — never originals — of one document showing your Social Security number and one showing your current address.

• Equifax — Equifax Information Services LLC, P.O. Box 105788, Atlanta, GA 30348-5788
• Experian — Experian Security Freeze, P.O. Box 9554, Allen, TX 75013
• TransUnion — TransUnion, P.O. Box 160, Woodlyn, PA 19094

Those are the legal maximums once the bureau has what it needs, not the usual wait. Online, all three are normally immediate.

Children can be frozen too

A child under 16 is a protected consumer under the same law, and their freeze is free as well. Most children have no credit file at all, so the bureau has to create a record for the sole purpose of freezing it, which the statute requires it to do. Expect to send proof by post: the child’s identity, your identity, and your authority over them, usually a birth certificate naming you.

It is worth the stamp. A child’s Social Security number is attractive to a thief precisely because nobody checks it for eighteen years.

Lifting it to apply for a home

This is the part that matters on the day, and the part people get wrong.

• Lift before you apply, not after — though not for the reason usually given. Tenant screening is an express exception in the statute: the rule that makes a freeze block a new credit application does not apply to a report pulled for renting, so a screener may be able to reach your frozen file whatever you do. Practice is less tidy than the law. Screening platforms often stumble on a frozen file anyway, return it as unverifiable, and some landlords read that as a red flag rather than a security measure.
• Ask which bureau they pull. Many screeners use one. If you know which, you lift one instead of three. If nobody can tell you, lift all three.
• Use a temporary lift with an end date rather than removing the freeze. It closes itself and you cannot forget.
• Online or by phone, the bureau must lift it within one hour. By mail it is three business days, which is slower than most application windows.

One hour is the legal maximum, not the typical wait. In practice an online lift is usually immediate. But plan the hour, because the one time it takes the full hour will be the afternoon the listing goes to someone else.

The reports you have probably never seen

Your credit file is not what decides a tenancy on its own. Landlords buy a tenant screening report, and those come from specialty consumer reporting companies that most people have never heard of and cannot name.

Such a report can carry your credit history, your rental history, eviction filings and lawsuits, employment verification, criminal history, sex offender registries, terrorist watchlist checks, and a risk score somebody's model produced from all of it.

Two things follow that are worth knowing before you need them.

• Eviction records do not care whether you lost. A filing can appear even where the case was dismissed or you won it. It is a court record, and the screening company collected it.
• The errors are somebody else's. Common names get merged. A file can carry a namesake's eviction from a city you have never lived in.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publishes a list of these companies every year, which is the only practical way to find out who holds a file on you. It is on consumerfinance.gov.

The ones that come up for renting

These are the tenant screening companies on the Bureau’s current list. Most owe you a copy of your own file once every twelve months, free, and all of them owe you one within 60 days if a report of theirs was used to turn you down.

• SafeRent Solutions — the company formerly called CoreLogic Rental Property Solutions. Offers its own freeze on request.
• First Advantage Resident Solutions — also offers its own freeze, by phone or email.
• RealPage, whose product a landlord may call LeasingDesk
• TransUnion Rental Screening Solutions, sold to landlords as SmartMove
• Experian RentBureau
• RentGrow, AmRent, AppFolio, Contemporary Information Corp and Screening Reports, Inc.

Two of those — SafeRent and First Advantage — will freeze their own file for you, which is a different thing from a credit freeze and worth asking about if you are not house-hunting at the moment.

The useful move before you start applying is the dull one: ask the landlord or agent which screening company and which credit bureau they use. One question, asked before you pay an application fee, tells you exactly which file to check and which freeze to lift.

If you are turned down

A refusal based on a report is not the end of the conversation, and the law gives you specific things rather than a general right to complain.

• The landlord must tell you that a screening report contributed to the decision, and must give you the reporting company's contact details.
• You can request a free copy of that report within 60 days of being turned down. Not a summary. The report.
• You can dispute anything wrong in it, and the company has to investigate.

Ask for all of it in writing and ask the same day. Sixty days sounds generous until you are four applications deep and cannot remember which company screened which building.

Check what is on file before a landlord does

• Your credit reports are free at annualcreditreport.com. That is the site created by federal law. The ones advertised on television are selling subscriptions.
• Read the addresses section first. An address you have never lived at is the earliest sign somebody is using your identity, and it shows up long before a debt does.
• Do it before you start looking, not during. An error takes weeks to correct and you will not have weeks once you have found the apartment.

What we do with what you give us

It would be a strange page that told you to guard your Social Security number without saying what happens to the one you give us.

• We screen every applicant over 18 against the same written criteria: credit, income verification, eviction history and previous landlord references. The same standard for everyone is both the fair position and the only defensible one.
• If we turn down an application on the strength of a report, we tell you that, and we tell you who produced it, so you can get your free copy and dispute it.
• We do not sell applicant data, and we do not pass it to anyone outside the screening required to process your application.

If you are applying with us and your file is frozen, tell us before you lift it. We will tell you which bureau gets pulled, so you can lift one rather than three.

Frequently asked questions