Building a credit history from scratch may seem like a daunting task, but your rent payments can turn out unexpectedly useful. CreditLadder helps you make them count.
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Sign up to CreditLadder in under 5 minutes
Let your rent payments improve your credit score and build your credit history
Report to 1 credit agency (Experian, Equifax or TransUnion) for free or to all of them from £5/month
When you’re a young professional, there are a few certainties in your financial life: one is that you’ll spend too much on gin and tonics, another one is the standing order with which you pay the rent on the first day of the month, and the third is that the two of them combined mean you’ll only have spare change to do your grocery shopping for the remaining 29 days.
Rent doesn’t exactly come cheap these days, so why not at least use it to improve your credit history? CreditLadder can help with that. The service it offers is now over 5 years old and can now help you build a positive credit history with the 3 main UK credit reference agencies (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion).
Explain CreditLadder to me in three sentences
CreditLadder is a service that allows you to have your rent payments recorded in your Experian, Equifax and TransUnion credit report. Potential lenders will be able to see them, so paying the rent on time each month will help you establish yourself as a reliable borrower who can keep up with regular payments. CreditLadder could be particularly useful for people who don’t have much of a credit history yet, to help them build one and access more affordable credit.
How does it work?
It’s fairly simple:
CreditLadder connects to your bank account through Open Banking. When you sign up, you’ll be asked to grant CreditLadder read-only access to your transactions. Credit Ladder can then identify and track your rent payments. It can work with 95% of bank accounts – you’ll need to be paying the rent from a supported current account or you won’t be able to use the service.
It reports your payments to Experian, Equifax or TransUnion (or all three). The credit reference agency will add your rent payments to your credit report. Experian, Equifax and TransUnion are the three largest credit reference agencies in the UK.
Lenders can see the payment history and take it into account when making a decision. If they do and you make your rent payments on time, you could be offered better rates than you normally would.
How does having my rent payments on my credit report help me?
It isn’t easy to quantify, but there are a couple of things to take into account.
First of all, signing up to the scheme makes it easier to prove your identity online, which means that, for example, you may be able to open a bank account without having to provide physical proof of identity. Experian says that with the scheme, the proportion of tenants who can prove their identity online will go from 39% to 84%.
Things are trickier when it comes to actually improving your credit score. Experian says that 79% of tenants would benefit from the scheme by seeing their credit score go up. But that’s only if lenders decided to take rental data into account, which is not standard practice yet.
For now, rental records will appear on your credit file, but won’t automatically feed your Experian credit score (the silver lining being that if you pay the rent late once, it shouldn’t damage your credit score either).
An Experian spokesperson told Finder: “More than 1 million tenants now have their rent payment records included in their Experian credit report, which both they and lenders can see but it won’t have an additional impact on their credit score just yet. Several lenders are now testing the data before they incorporate it into their decision making, which is the usual process for new data sets. So it’s not yet being factored into people’s credit scores but this should soon change.”
Ultimately, like paying back a loan on time, making on-time rent payments can demonstrate to future would-be lenders that you’ve been responsible with your financial obligations.
Who is behind CreditLadder?
CreditLadder launched in 2016. The CEO is Sheraz Dar, who previously worked in various digital businesses including OpenRent. CreditLadder was the first company to report to Experian’s Rental Exchange scheme.
The Rental Exchange scheme is a partnership between The Big Issue and Experian. It was born in 2010, but only since October 2018 have rent payments been appearing on tenants’ credit files.
What’s the good and the bad of CreditLadder?
Pros
It can help you build a positive credit history.
It helps you prove your identity online.
You could be able to access cheaper rates on loans, credit cards and mortgages.
It’s free to get your rent reported to one credit agency with CreditLadder.
Signing up is quick and easy.
Landlords can refer their tenants to CreditLadder.
For landlords: tenants are strongly incentivised to pay the rent on time.
Cons
Reporting to all three credit reference agencies costs from £5 per month.
For now, not many lenders take rent into account when assessing your credit application.
For now, although your rent payments can be recorded on your Experian credit file, they won’t directly impact your Experian credit score (rent payments can affect your Equifax and TransUnion credit scores).
It’s worth noting that any boost to your credit score isn’t guaranteed – if you keep up with rent payments (and CreditLadder reports these to credit agencies) but at the same time you miss credit card repayments, your score will go down not up, for example.
How much does it cost?
The basic service that includes reporting to 1 credit agency only (you can choose Experian, Equifax or TransUnion) is completely free.
If you sign up to the CreditLadder annual plan (for £60 a year/£5 a month) or CreditLadder monthly plan (for £8 a month), you will be able to report to all three agencies (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion).
Alternatives to CreditLadder
Making rent count towards your credit score may seem like a fairly obvious thing to implement, but it’s actually very new. For now only CreditLadder reports rent payments to all three biggest Credit Reference Agencies in the UK.
However, instead of self-reporting through CreditLadder, you can also ask your landlord to report directly to the Experian’s Rental Exchange scheme for you. Council or social housing tenants can do it and so can private tenants if their landlord or agency manages at least 500 properties.
The other option for self-reporting is another startup called Canopy. It reports your rent payments to The Rental Exchange too, while also building a “digital rental profile” that allows you to instantly prove to potential landlords you can afford the rent, making reference and affordability checks way quicker. CreditLadder is planning a similar service, but it hasn’t launched yet.
Finally, don’t forget that there are multiple ways to build your credit history, and some are more straightforward than making your rent count. Make sure you’re on the electoral roll and try to never miss payments. You could also consider a specific credit builder product, such as LOQBOX or a credit builder credit card.
Frequently asked questions
Totally. If you don’t want your rent payments to be reported to Experian, Equifax or TransUnion, there’s no way you can be forced to accept it. “It is always the tenant’s choice whether they wish to sign up. The tenant is the only one who can consent to share their data with us through Open Banking,” says CreditLadder.
CreditLadder is registered and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It accesses your banking information in a read-only mode, using open banking, so there’s no way money can be taken from your bank account that way. Finally, if you’re worried about your bank login details, know that CreditLadder doesn’t store them. Instead, “once you initially sign up through our FCA regulated partner TrueLayer, they obtain an encrypted token for read only access to your account,” says CreditLadder.
You can certainly try, but most lenders will have their own assessing system in place and might not be willing to change it in the near future.
As we’ve said, rent payments are not normally reported to the credit reference agencies. However, arrears might if for example your landlord takes you to court and you thus receive a CCJ (county court judgement). Unless paid in full within 30 days, a CCJ will stay on your credit report for six years.
Valentina Cipriani was a writer at Finder UK. She wrote news, features and guides about banking and credit cards, helping people to improve their financial lives. She holds an MA in International Journalism.
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