The Rise of Rent Reporting as a Credit Building Tool

Credit scores can affect access to financial products, housing, and employment: a low credit score or lack of acredit score can mean less access or higher costs. Traditionally, rental payments do not get reported to credit bureaus to use in credit score calculations, even though they are often renters’ largest monthly expenditure.

Rent reporting is a process whereby landlords or property management companies provide data on tenants’ rental payments to at least one of the three major consumer credit bureaus. This gives renters an opportunity to demonstrate their credit worthiness by documenting on-time rent payments. The major credit scoring models, in turn, are updating their scoring algorithms to include rental payments in credit score calculations. The practice of
rent reporting has been gaining traction in recent years. We took a closer look at rent reporting trends across the country.

More Than 13 Percent of US Renter Households Have Ever Had Rent Payments Reported

To understand how rent reporting is growing, we estimated the share of renter households who have had any rental payments reported since 2020 (figure 1). In just four years, the share of renter households who have had any of their rent payments reported has quadrupled, from about 3 percent of renter households in 2020 to 13 percent in 2024. Looking only at the number of open rental tradelines—which indicates ongoing rent reporting—the share of renter households actively participating in rent-payment reporting grew from about 2 percent to nearly 7 percent.