How and Where to Check Your Credit Scores for Free in 2012

By Pinyo, on April 5, 2012

Do you want to know your credit score but are not sure where to look? This article will walk you through the three main ways you can check your credit score for FREE. It will also touch on why you cannot get free credit scores from AnnualCreditReport.com and explain the different types of credit scores. Whether you plan to borrow money or not, your credit score is important and you should know yours — and why not? — when you can check your score for free without giving away your credit card number.

First, let’s dive right into the three main ways to check your score for free:

1. Free Credit Score Sites – There are several specialized sites that give you access to your credit score for free with no credit card requirement. These sites include Credit Sesame, Credit Karma, Quizzle, and Equifax Credit Score Card™.
2. Credit Monitoring Service Trials – Many credit monitoring services offer a free trial. As part of the trial, you can experience their services, which include instant access to your credit reports and scores after successful enrollment.
3. Lenders – Peer-to-peer lending sites like Prosper and Lending Club give you access to your credit score if you apply to become a borrower. You can also access your credit score whenever you apply for a loan.

Free Credit Score Sites

First, there are services out there that let you access your credit scores for free…absolutely free. Here are the ways to obtain your credit scores from Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian (the three major credit reporting agencies).

FREE from Credit Sesame

FREE from Credit Karma

FREE from Equifax Credit Score Card™

Experian Score

Credit Sesame and Quizzle let you access your Experian credit score absolutely free (no credit card required) in about 5 minutes. They also provide other financial information about you. This information is gathered from Experian database and is a very accurate reflection of your current financial picture.

For more detail about free credit score from Credit Sesame, please read: How to Get Free Experian Credit Score from Credit Sesame.

TransUnion Score

Credit Karma give you access to your TransUnion credit score for free without credit card and with no hidden costs or obligations. For more detail free credit score from Credit Karma, please read: How to Get Free TransUnion Credit Score from Credit Karma.

Equifax Score

There is current no completely free option to obtain your Equifax score. You can access your score through one of the Equifax offers (e.g., for a one-time fee of $19.95 one-time), take advantage of a 30-day free trial from GoFreeCredit.com, or get a rating (i.e., a range of scores) from Equifax Credit Score Card™.

Here is what an estimated score looks like:

Credit Monitoring and Identity Protection Trials

Second, you can get access to all 3 credit scores when you successfully enroll in one of the credit monitoring and identity protection services below. Note that you will be obligated to pay for the service when the trial is over unless you cancel (you can keep your credit scores and report).

	PrivacyGuard: Instant access to all 3 credit scores with successful enrollment in a 30-day trial for $1, $14.99 per month thereafter
	Creditreport.com: Instant access to all 3 credit scores with successful enrollment in a 7-day FREE credit monitoring trial, $19.95 per month thereafter

More about Credit Monitoring and Identity Protection

Knowing your credit scores is just one piece of the equation. When you sign up for one of the free trials above, be sure to check out the benefits of being enrolled in a credit monitoring and identity protection program. If your credit is in a high-risk category, or you just want more peace of mind, credit monitoring can alert you about changes to your credit profile (allowing you to quickly react to any problem) and identity protection can insure you against any loss due identity theft.

Lenders

In addition to methods outline above, you will also gain access to your credit scores when you apply for a loan. While the credit score is free, accessing your scores this way will show up as a hard pull credit inquiry that slightly hurt your scores. Also, I do not recommend you applying for a loan just to see your scores.

• Personal loan - If you take out a personal loan, e.g., become a borrower on LendingClub or Prosper, you will gain access to your credit score.
• Car loan – When you finance the purchase of your new or used car, the loan officer will pull your credit scores to determine your creditworthiness and what he can offer you. Whether you are approved or rejected, you have the right to know the scores that he pulled, so feel free to ask him for it.
• Home loan – When you pre-qualify for a loan, or apply for a loan (a mortgage or refinancing), the lender will pull your credit scores (usually from all three credit reporting agencies). Again, you can request this information and see your credit ratings.

If you don’t know your scores yet, give one of these sites a try.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why can’t I just get my credit scores from AnnualCreditReport.com?

While AnnualCreditReport.com is the best place to get your free credit reports from the three major reporting agencies (TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian), you CANNOT get free credit scores from them. However, the fee to get your scores through AnnualCreditReport.com is nominal; and you could opt to pay for your scores there.

What credit score will I be getting with these services?

These services do not provide your true FICO credit score (you can get this from myFICO). You will have to read carefully about each service and the score(s) they provide. In my experience, I found them to be equally good and only found negligible differences among them.

To learn more about the different types of credit score, please read: Different Types of Credit Scores: FICO, FAKO, and Enhanced.

Do you know your credit scores? Get instant access to your credit score for free with Credit Sesame.

Pinyo is the owner of Moolanomy Personal Finance and an entrepreneur with over 20 years of business experience. He is interested in business management, investing and wealth management. He has written for many online publications, including American Express Currency and U.S. News Money. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Add Your Question or Comment (24 Comments)

1. sandy lewis:

   May 22, 2010 at 4:26 pm

   The FICO score it a number that rates your credit worthiness. It can be a very low number where anyone for anything will turn you away fast or around mid 5 hundreds may get you something but at a high interest rate. 7 -800 is the best credit history. Everything on your credit report boils down to what matters to who your trying to buy or rent from, the FICO score. There’s been enough on tv about it, You’d think everyone would know unless they had their head in a hole for years. If you have are in the highest range you can often buy a car without paying interest. In my dreams, life doesn’t always turn out like you’d hoped. And you don’t see into the future while making hundreds of mistakes along the way. The market may not be out there anymore but your FICO score follows you for life!
2. dani:

   August 15, 2010 at 11:59 pm

   ok.so with all these different sites.which one is the right one?how can I get my score for the first time and not give out my credit card number.u can never be sure anymore now a days.free is always a lie it seems
3. Pinyo:

   August 16, 2010 at 1:55 pm

   @dani – My suggestion is to look at Credit Karma and Credit Sesame. The TransUnion and Experian scores should be a good predictor of your FICO score. However, if you really want your FICO score and worry about paying a subscription fee, then try MyFICO. It only charges you a one-time fee.
4. Jack Thomas:

   September 14, 2010 at 10:45 pm

   Unfortunately your FICO score is more and more important. Even insurance companies use your personal credit to determine how much money they’re going to charge you. If you have a low FICO score you could pay as much as three times more than someone with a superior FICO credit score!!
5. D:

   October 29, 2010 at 2:39 pm

   I don’t understand. Can’t you just use annualcreditreport.com which is the only legit site to provide free annual credit reports anyway?
6. MIke Clover:

   November 3, 2010 at 11:15 am

   annualcreditreport.com is a great site for just your credit report once a year. But you dont get a consumer credit score there for free. You must pay for it. You can sign up for some of these services and get monitoring and identity theft protection. You may shop around and compare.
7. Jack Riis:

   November 5, 2010 at 12:25 pm

   Quizzle.com (for Experian), CreditKarma.com (for TransUnion) and MyFICO.com (for FICO) are the ones I use. All other sites which provide reports or scores will try to sell you a subscription which you need to cancel. The problem is that some of them will put you in more than one subscription from more than one company. Naturally many people will cancel the obvious subscription from the same site they got the service from, but they won’t notice the additional subscriptions and ultimately get charged until they notice the extra transactions on their statement. That’s how the Scam usually works in it’s most innocent form. If you’re wondering what other forms there are, I remember a friend of mine who got his information stolen by a similar theme website and a fake loan was opened with his name and SSN. He paid a lawyer about 5K to fight the fraudulent loan which was about a half of the actual loan amount.
8. TD:

   November 28, 2010 at 11:45 am

   In actuality, all these sites are BS, because they want to sell you a service that you can do on your own, that being to monitor your own credit. I have no problem paying to see my three scores if it was a one time and done payment, but that’s not the way it is. There’s a catch with their monthly billing subscription.

   The average person doesn’t have time to call or might forget to cancel their subscriptions and that is exactly what these companies are banking on. On top of that, when you try to cancel, you have a telemarketer on the other end of the line that tries to convince you to stay with their service. They’ll even offer you a deal where the monthly payment will be cut in half for the next three months. They will always say to just call them before the three months is over to cancel, otherwise the rate goes back to normal. Again, they are banking on the fact that you will forget.

   Screw all of them. Just give me my credit score. That’s all I want.
9. Pinyo:

   November 29, 2010 at 12:26 pm

   @TD – Quizzle, Credit Sesame, and Credit Karma are all free. You can also opt to use one time payment with MyFICO and Equifax.
10. kong:

    December 21, 2010 at 12:25 am

    With the FICO scores, how many time within a year do I need to keep my eyes on?
11. mark000:

    March 20, 2011 at 10:14 am

    I have learned the hard way not too give my credit card # for a trial offer. Seems like every time I do it I get ripped off. One time I had to close my bank account because I couldnt get them to stop billing me the bank couldnt even stop it. 6 (bills)months later and a new accound it stopped.
12. Pinyo:

    April 19, 2011 at 10:56 pm

    @kong — I only look at it about once every 3 months. The scores aren’t that important until you’re getting close to making major financial moves, e.g., taking out a mortgage.

    @mark000 and louiszinsky — You may want to give Quizzle and Credit Karma a try. No cost and no credit card needed (as far as I can recall).
13. lele:

    April 22, 2011 at 12:26 am

    I read that the scores that experian gives are not the scores lenders see and make decisions off of. I’m afraid Quizzle and Credit Karma is providing the “experian plus” score which is only an estimate of what your actual score may be. Is this true?
14. Pinyo:

    April 22, 2011 at 8:48 am

    @lele – Quizzle provides Experian consumer score and Credit Karma provides TransUnion consumer score (plus their the new VantageScore). You are correct that these are not the exact numbers that your lenders see; however, these score should give you a good approximation of how good your score is. I compared my consumer scores against the one my mortgage lender used and they were within 50 points of each other.
15. Gary:

    April 30, 2011 at 2:05 pm

    Thank you for this very helpful site. I am especially impressed with Credit Karma.
16. Derrick:

    May 28, 2011 at 7:05 pm

    I’ve always preferred annualcreditreport.com I think its a government site for credit reports, isn’t it?
17. Pinyo:

    May 29, 2011 at 11:15 am

    Derrick, AnnualCreditReport.com is great for getting free credit report from each of the three credit agencies, but you cannot get free credit score from them.
18. Bernz:

    August 29, 2011 at 2:32 pm

    I remember a conversation from a senior retiree about 69 years old friend of our family. With the recent housing mess, his mortgage is more than what his home is worth. I asked him what’s his plan. His reply: “to heck with my credit score. I’m walking away, the last thing I would worry about is my credit scores at my age.”
19. Bethy:

    November 29, 2011 at 1:55 pm

    This is a great comprehensive overview, Pinyo. Thanks for including Credit Karma and clearing up any misunderstandings. Credit Karma will never ask for your credit card information; our services will always be free.
20. Cherleen:

    November 30, 2011 at 3:43 am

    Nice tips… I guess I will apply for a car loan even if I don’t have any intention of getting one. I just want to see my credit score. LOL.
21. Pinyo:

    November 30, 2011 at 10:49 am

    @Cherleen – Why don’t you try Credit Sesame? I wouldn’t get a loan or apply for one just to get my credit scores.
22. Jeff Crews:

    February 15, 2012 at 12:42 am

    I really like how CreditKarma works. They are their for the people and are great to work with!
23. Mauricio:

    March 16, 2012 at 2:02 am

    If I use credit sesame or credit karma will this appear as an inquiry on my credit report?
24. Pinyo:

    March 21, 2012 at 10:03 pm

    @Mauricio – No. These are soft pulls and they do not show up on your credit reports or affect your scores.

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