Why Is My Good Credit Not Showing on My Credit Report?

Your credit and loan providers report your accounts to the credit bureaus. These accounts, and the payment history for each, then appear as trade lines, or account lines, on your credit report. Positive trade lines that demonstrate a history of timely payments help your credit rating, while negative trade lines reflecting charge-offs or multiple late payments damage your credit scores. Unfortunately, in certain situations, your good credit may not show up on your credit report.

Reporting Contracts

An information provider must have a contract with the credit bureaus to report your accounts and their status. Because each credit bureau maintains different standards for reporting program membership, your creditor may meet the standards of one or two bureaus but not all three. Should this occur, your trade lines for that creditor do not show up on all three of your credit reports. Pulling and reviewing a copy of your credit report from Experian, Equifax and TransUnion helps you identify which credit bureaus, if any, have your reports.

Types of Accounts

Just because you hold an account with a company and make timely payments, this does not mean that your payments help build your credit history. For example, your cell phone bills, utility bills, gas cards and your monthly rent payment typically do not appear on any of your credit reports as positive trade lines.

While paying certain accounts on time does not contribute to your credit rating, leaving them unpaid damages your scores if your debt gets turned over to a collection agency. Collection agencies do report accounts to the credit bureaus, and collection accounts negatively impact your credit rating.

Credit Errors

If your creditor has incorrect information on file for you, the reports it sends to the credit bureaus may end up on someone else's credit report. Contact your information provider and double-check the personal information it has on file, such as the spelling of your name, your birth date and your Social Security number. This helps helps you identify and correct any reporting errors responsible for your creditor's lack of a trade line.

Reporting Period

If your account with your creditor is relatively new, its trade line will not immediately appear on your credit report. All information providers update consumer credit records on a different time frame. Therefore, you may need to wait 60 days or more before your new positive trade line shows up on your credit report.

On the same note, if the positive trade line is for an old, closed account, the Fair Credit Reporting Act notes that the credit bureaus have the right to remove accounts that are no longer active after a pre-set period of time -- usually seven years.