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Did you know that the most common bills you pay every month do nothing to help you build credit? For example, monthly payments made to your landlord or electricity provider do not typically appear on your credit file.
Only credit card payments and loan payments get sent to the major credit bureaus (by the loan originator or credit card issuer).
But these other monthly bills can have an impact on your credit scores. You just have to take a few extra steps to get these bills added to your credit history.
Can I Report Utility Bills to Credit Bureaus?
Utility bill payments can be added to your credit reports, but they are not put there automatically.
Reporting to the credit bureaus requires following stringent guidelines and paying a fee. Because of this, most utility providers choose not to report to the credit bureaus.
You can try contacting your utility providers to see if you can reach an agreement with them to report your payments to the credit reporting agencies. However, this usually involves you paying the reporting fee. And most utility companies will probably tell you no.
The better and easier option is to use a third-party reporting service. These services will usually charge you a small fee to report a variety of utility payments. This can include electricity bills, cell phone bills, and subscription services.
You cannot contact the credit bureaus directly to have your utilities reported. Each credit reporting agency has strict laws governing what information can be included on a credit report and who can add to it.
As a consumer, you cannot add items to the credit bureaus directly; you can only dispute and remove inaccurate or fraudulent information from your credit reports.
How Do I Self-Report Utilities to Credit Bureaus?
Aside from working out a deal with your utility company to report your payments to the credit bureaus, the only other way you can “self-report” is to hire a third-party utility reporting service.
The companies below can report payment history for various utilities, often for a small monthly fee.
Here at Digital Honey, we recommend two services: Grow Credit and Experian BOOST™. Below, we will look at each service’s features and provide you with some additional credit-building alternatives.
Grow Credit
Grow Credit is a service that allows you to build credit using your subscriptions and cell phone services. They also report internet service and insurance bills from some companies.
But instead of reporting individual utilities, Grow Credit operates like a revolving tradeline.
When you sign up for one of Grow Credit’s plans, you are actually applying for a Mastercard. When you apply, there is no hard inquiry.
Most of Grow Credit’s plans are unsecured lines of credit, but they do offer one secured credit card to help out those that do not qualify for their other plans.
Each of the paid Grow Credit plans comes with a different credit limit and fee. For example, the Build Secured plan comes with a $17 monthly spending limit at $1.99 a month, while the Accelerate Membership plan comes with a $150 monthly spending limit at just $7.99 a month.
You can only use the Grow Credit Mastercard to pay for subscription services. But each month that you do, Grow Credit will send your payment history, credit limit, and balance to all three credit bureaus.
This can help you build your payment history, lower your credit utilization ratio, improve your credit mix, and increase your length of credit history over time. Grow Credit reports this information to all three credit bureaus.
For a complete list of the subscription services that Grow Credit supports (and even offers discounts on), see their Subscriptions page. They report payments from many commonly used companies including Netflix, Verizon, DirecTV, Spotify, Comcast Xfinity, and more.
Grow Credit is our favorite tool for building credit with your regular bills because they report to all three credit bureaus and they report it as a Mastercard revolving credit account. Grow Credit users typically see a whopping 51-point FICO score increase after using the service for 12 months.
This is much better for your credit than what competitor services offer. As we’ll outline below, competitor services typically report payments as utility tradelines to only one or two credit bureaus.
Experian BOOST™
If you want to try building your credit for free, then Experian BOOST™ is worth checking out.
Using the Boost tool, you can have a variety of utility providers and subscription services added to your Experian credit report.
First, you’ll need to create an Experian account. This account is 100% free and offers you access to credit monitoring services as well as your free Experian FICO credit score.
Once you’ve signed up with Experian, you can use their Boost tool. This service will comb through your bank accounts and search for recurring payments. These recurring payments can then be added as utility payments to your Experian credit report.
You can handpick the utilities you do and do not want to report. And no late payments will ever be reported by Boost; only positive payment history is reported.
Credit score improvement will be shown immediately.
If you are ever unhappy with the service, you can have all of your utilities completely removed from your Experian credit report.
And if you need any other encouragement, Experian offers a real-time results tool on their homepage that shows how much they’ve been able to improve users’ scores that prove their service is m