Turned down for credit?We can help.
Getting a no on a car, an apartment, a credit card, or a loan happens to a lot of people. Here's how to find out why, and what you can do about it.
How to find out why you were denied
Open every piece of mail, even the stuff that looks like junk. When a company turns you down because of your credit, federal law says they have to send you a notice (opens in a new tab) explaining it. It arrives by mail or email, and most people throw it away without opening it.
That notice will tell you which credit bureau they pulled from, the score they used, what hurt that score the most, and that you can get a free copy of the report within 60 days. When you get the notice, request the report.
If you don’t want to wait for the mail, take our free credit review to see your file the way a lender would.
Notice of action taken
Balances high compared to the limit
Understand what they were looking at
Many of our clients feel confused or unfairly judged when they are denied. This is completely normal. Know that the creditor wasn’t judging you: they mostly use algorithms to decide who is and who isn’t eligible, and those algorithms take different things on a credit file into account depending on the lender.
Most people get turned down when one or more of these things appears on their file:
Late payments
Accounts that went to collections
Balances that are high compared to the limit
Not enough credit history
Challenge anything wrong or out of date
You have a legal right to dispute what's wrong, out of date, or that the company can't back up when we ask them to. It happens more than you think:
Almost half of the participants in a Consumer Reports study found errors on their file (opens in a new tab), and a quarter of them had errors serious enough to limit their credit options.
If a credit bureau can’t prove that the item should be there, they’re required to remove it.
If something is accurate and current and the company can prove it, nobody can take it off. Most negative items drop off on their own (opens in a new tab) about seven years after you first fell behind.
If you’re curious about what’s on your report, your free credit review shows you the negative items that may have contributed to the denial.
Turn the ‘no’ into a ‘yes’
Once you’ve disputed anything inaccurate, outdated, unverifiable or misleading, and it’s been successfully removed from your report, your credit score may improve, and so may your odds of approval for what you applied for.
Your rights after you're turned down
The right to know why. A lender that turns you down has to tell you, and you have a right to the specific reasons (opens in a new tab). If the notice doesn't list them, it has to tell you how to ask, and you have 60 days to do it.
A free copy of the report they used. If your credit report played a part, you can get a free copy from the bureau the lender used (opens in a new tab) if you ask within 60 days of the notice. You can dispute anything in it that's wrong.
There are additional options available, but which ones apply to you will depend on your individual history. We'll review your history together to determine which options are most appropriate for your situation.
What happens when you start
We'll pull your report and read it with you, line by line, so you see your file the way a lender is seeing it. You tell us which items you’d like to dispute and we handle the process with the bureaus in a compliant way.
See your credit like a lender would
We’ll show you exactly what’s on your file and what might have contributed to being denied.
This is a soft credit pull, so it won’t impact your score.