Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) is the federal law that governs how credit reporting companies collect, share, and correct information about you. It gives every consumer a specific set of rights — understanding them is useful whether or not you ever use a paid dispute service.

What the FCRA gives you

• The right to know what's in your file, including a free copy of your report from each bureau every 12 months.
• The right to dispute incomplete or inaccurate information, for free, directly with the credit reporting company or the business that reported it.
• The right to have a credit reporting company investigate your dispute — generally within 30 days, or 45 days in some circumstances — and correct or remove information found to be inaccurate, incomplete, or unverifiable.
• The right to add a brief statement to your file explaining your side of a disputed item.
• The right to be told if information in your file was used against you — for example, in a decision to deny you credit, insurance, or employment.
• The right to sue a credit reporting company, furnisher of information, or (where applicable) a credit repair organization that violates the law.

What the FCRA doesn't do

It doesn't entitle you to have accurate, current, negative information removed just because it's unflattering — late payments, collections, and charge-offs that are correctly reported can and generally do stay on your file for the time period the law allows (commonly up to seven years for most negative items). The right the FCRA gives you is to accuracy, not to a clean report on request.

You can always dispute for free, yourself

Nothing about these rights requires paying anyone. You can write directly to a credit reporting company or a furnisher and dispute information yourself at no cost. Services like Approved Disputes exist to make that process more organized — not to grant rights you don't already have.

Read the full text and further guidance from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.

This article is educational and general in nature — it isn't legal advice about your specific situation.