• United States
  • Find Experian Worldwide Locations

Checking your report for employment reports does not hurt credit scores

Ask Experian

E-mail Address
City
State
Question
Your privacy and the information collected here.

Do you have a question about consumer credit? You may find an immediate answer by using the search engine. If you can't find what you're looking for, please fill out the form, being as specific as possible.

Please note: The Ask Experian team cannot respond to each question individually. However, if your question is of interest to a wide audience of consumers, the Experian team will include it in a future column.

RSS icon  Subscribe to RSS feed

Credit Advice

Topics addressed on June 25, 2008:

Checking your report for employment reports does not hurt credit scores

Dear Max,

We recently heard that our credit rating went down because other people are checking our credit. I am in public ministry. People check me out all the time. Recently I was a candidate for Chaplain of the New Hampshire State Police. They also ran checks on me. Why should my rating go down when we continue to be responsible with our finances?

- DCA

Dear DCA,

The information you received is one of the most common bits of misinformation I hear about credit reports. Checking your credit report for employment purposes has no impact on your creditworthiness and does not affect credit scores at all.

When an employer checks your credit history, an inquiry is added. But, that inquiry will only appear on your personal credit report.

That inquiry will not appear on reports given to anyone else, including lenders or other potential employers. Because it is not given to anyone but you, it will not impact your credit scores in any way.

Credit reports provided for employment purposes also contain less information than reports used for lending. Employment reports exclude any information that would be in violation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (EEOA). So, they do not have any information about marital status, and exclude your birthdate, for example.

Experian also removes account numbers from credit reports issued for employment purposes because that information is not needed for job placement.

Thanks for asking.

  • © 2010 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.