Check credit score free in India, then read the report

India has four credit bureaus licensed by the Reserve Bank of India, formally called credit information companies: TransUnion CIBIL, Experian, Equifax and CRIF High Mark. They are not rival products you pick between. Each collects repayment data from banks and other lenders, keeps its own file on you, and computes its own score from that file. When you apply for a loan or a card, the lender decides which bureau, or which several, to pull.

RBI requires each of the four to give you one full credit report, including the score, free once every calendar year when you ask for it. Across the four bureaus, you are owed four free full reports a year. The usual pattern is to read one, or none, or to pay a monthly subscription for a report that was owed free.

The four scores rarely match exactly, and a gap is not by itself a sign of an error. Each bureau runs its own scoring model and weighs the same facts its own way. Each receives lenders' updates on its own timing, so one may already reflect last fortnight's payment while another does not. And each matches incoming records to you using your name, PAN, date of birth and address, so a record with a misspelt name can land on one bureau's file and miss another's. A small gap is normal. A large one is a reason to read both reports side by side, account by account.

The free annual report is requested from each bureau's own website. Each bureau also sells paid plans with more frequent updates, and those tend to be the more prominent option on the page; the free report is there, sometimes a scroll further down. Before you start, have your PAN, date of birth, current address, and the mobile number and email that your lenders have on file. A report requested with a phone number no lender knows is the commonest reason identity checks fail.

An enquiry is a record that someone looked at your credit file. The bureau notes who looked and why, and the why decides whether it touches the score.

A soft enquiry is a look not tied to an application for credit: you checking your own report, a lender you already borrow from reviewing your account, or a lender screening you for an offer you did not ask for. Soft enquiries are not treated as credit-seeking and do not lower your score. You could check your own report every day and nothing would happen to it.

A hard enquiry is a lender pulling your report because you applied for a loan or a card. It sits in the enquiry section that other lenders see. One is minor. Several in a short window read as someone looking for credit in a hurry, and that is the pattern scoring models are built to notice. Bureaus are also required to alert you by SMS or email when a lender accesses your report, so an alert you cannot explain is worth opening the report for.

A credit report has a personal section, an account section with one block per loan or card, and an enquiry section. The score is computed from the account and enquiry sections. Every field that feeds it is something you can check against paperwork you already have.

Payment history carries the most weight and forgives the least: a late payment is a fact reported by the lender, and an accurate one stays. Utilisation is the one you can move fastest, because it is recomputed every time a new balance is reported. Credit mix and age change slowly and mostly reward not doing anything rash. Enquiries matter for a while and then fade with time.

Three cards, with the balance each issuer reported and the limit on the report. Redo it on your own: for each card, divide the reported balance by its limit; for the total, add the balances and divide by the sum of the limits. Bureaus do not publish how their models treat the two, but a lender reading your account blocks sees every card, not just the sum. Why the reported balance depends on the statement date, and what else makes a score fall between two checks, is on the page about why credit scores drop.

DPD means days past due: how many days after the due date a payment was still unpaid when the lender reported. Each account block has a grid of recent months, and each cell holds a number of days or a code. 000 means paid on time. XXX usually means nothing was reported for that month. An EMI due on the 2nd and paid on the 5th is three days past due, and depending on when the lender reported, that month can show 003 instead of 000. Small, but it sits in payment history, the heaviest field.

Go through the report in the order below. What to do once you find something, including the dispute route and its timelines, is on the page about credit report errors; this page is about finding it.

The bands below are informal. Each lender sets its own cut-offs, can pull any of the four bureaus, and weighs your income and existing EMIs alongside the score. Use the band to decide what to read first, not to predict a decision.

Now the cost of finding an error late. Suppose a wrongly reported late payment moves a ₹3 lakh, 36-month personal loan from an illustrative 11 percent to an illustrative 14 percent. The EMI goes from ₹9,822 to ₹10,253, a difference of ₹431 a month, which is easy to accept on the day. Over the loan it is ₹15,540 of extra interest, ₹69,118 against ₹53,578, for an error that was sitting in a report you were entitled to read free.

When you check loan eligibility on Unyfy, it pulls your Equifax credit report and shows your score and the accounts behind it, including any marked overdue, settled or written off, before you apply to any lender. For a full report from each bureau, the four free reports above still apply. The rest of this section is about the other side of the report: the card statements and transactions that later become the utilisation and payment-history lines, before any lender reports them.

It reads your bank and card transaction emails and, on Android, transactional SMS, with no manual entry, and parses statement PDFs from Axis, HDFC, ICICI, Kotak and Federal Bank. In the app you see each card's spending as it happens, so a card heading towards a high balance shows up while there is still time to pay it down before the statement date. On Pro, it also predicts what the coming month is already committed to, the EMIs, premiums and card bills on a cycle, so the payments that decide the next DPD cell are in one list before they fall due.

It never asks for your bank password or UPI PIN, and every payment is one you authorise.

Install Unyfy on Android, or use the web app at app.unyfy.co.in on an iPhone.