Somewhere there is a 47-year-old woman who pays her rent on the first of every month and carries no credit card debt. She also does not appear on a credit report. Not a low score. No file at all.
The industry calls this credit invisible, and it is not a punishment for bad habits. Credit scores measure how a person handles borrowed money, so someone who has never borrowed any leaves nothing to measure. Being careful is what made her unreadable.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau counted roughly 7 million credit invisible adults as of December 2020, plus another 25.3 million whose records were too thin or too stale to score.
Rent should have solved this and did not. It is the largest recurring bill in most households, and it has left no mark on a credit file the way a mortgage does. That is changing. According to Fannie Mae, 12 months of verified rent payments can now count toward a mortgage decision, and on-time rent reported to the bureaus can establish or lift a score.
Someone has to do the reporting, though, and most landlords do not. Ask first whether the building already takes part in a service; some are owner-paid and cost the tenant nothing.
If not, renters can enroll themselves, and how a service verifies payment decides which ones will work. Boom, Self, and Experian Boost scan a linked bank account, which rules them out for anyone paying by cash or money order. Rental Kharma and RentReporters verify with the landlord instead, so the payment method does not matter.
Ask two things before paying anyone. Which of the three bureaus does it reach — Rental Kharma, for one, reports to two of them. And does it report late payments along with the on-time ones?
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.