A consumer credit report is mostly a list of tradelines. A tradeline is one account as one furnisher describes it. Everything else — personal identifiers, inquiries, collections, public records — is a smaller section around that list.
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Date opened | When the furnisher says the account began. Drives the age of the account and, across all accounts, the average age of the file. |
| Date of last activity | Last movement the furnisher recorded. Often mistaken for the date that starts the seven-year purge clock. It is not. |
| Date of first delinquency | The one that matters. On a derogatory account this is what the seven-year window is measured from, and it does not move because the debt was sold. |
| High balance | The largest balance ever reported. On a closed card this is sometimes used in place of a credit limit. |
| Credit limit | Missing more often than you would expect. When it is blank, some models substitute the high balance, which can make utilization look far worse than it is. |
| Payment history grid | Month-by-month status for up to seven years. Read it right to left or left to right depending on the bureau; they do not agree on direction. |
| Account status vs payment status | Two separate fields. An account can be closed and still carry a payment status of 120 days late. |
Old addresses, name variants and misspellings accumulate here, and they are the usual mechanism by which someone else’s account attaches to your file. If you see a name variant you have never used or an address in a state you have never lived in, that is a thread worth pulling before you look at anything else.
Furnishers are not obliged to report to all three agencies, and many report to two. Small lenders, credit unions and some retail cards are the most common absentees. A tradeline missing from one report is therefore normal. A derogatory tradeline present on one report and absent from the others is still normal, but it is the case where verifying the details is most worth your time.
Practical note
Pull all three, not one. Reading them side by side takes an hour and finds nearly every discrepancy that a single report hides. Keep the copies you pulled — a dated copy is the thing that makes a later dispute straightforward.
Terms in this article are defined on the glossary page.
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