How to read your Equifax credit report, line by line

Short answer: An Equifax credit report is a seven-part record of how you have handled credit in Canada. Read it top to bottom: confirm the personal information is yours, then check every account's R rating, balance, limit and date of last activity, then collections, public records and inquiries. Your score is calculated from those lines, not stored in them.

Learning how to read an Equifax credit report in Canada takes about twenty minutes, and it is the only way to find the errors quietly costing you points. Most Canadians have never looked at their file. They have seen a three-digit number in a banking app and assumed that was the whole story. The number is a summary; the report is the evidence, and it is the evidence a lender, a landlord or an insurer reads.

What is on your Equifax credit report?

An Equifax credit report is a file with seven sections, in a fixed order. Everything on it was supplied by a lender, a collection agency, a court or you.

1. Personal information. Legal name and any variations, date of birth, Social Insurance Number if you gave it, current and previous addresses, phone numbers.
2. Employment information. Employers you listed on past credit applications. Often out of date; it does not affect your score.
3. Account information (tradelines). Every credit card, loan, line of credit and mortgage reported on you, each with its own rating and payment history. This is the bulk of the report.
4. Collections. Debts a creditor gave up on and sold or assigned to a collection agency.
5. Public records and other information. Bankruptcies, consumer proposals, court judgments, secured loans registered against you.
6. Inquiries. Every time your file was pulled, and by whom.
7. Consumer statement. An optional explanation you can add yourself, up to 800 characters, at no cost.

What is not on it matters just as much. Rent, utilities, phone bills, insurance, income, savings and net worth do not appear unless somebody is deliberately reporting them. A credit report measures behaviour with borrowed money, which is why someone who has paid rent perfectly for nine years can still have a file that says almost nothing.

How do you get your Equifax credit report for free in Canada?

You get the full report free by mail, and you pay only if you want it instantly online. Equifax Canada is required to give you a copy of your own file — the consumer disclosure — at no charge. Send a written request with your full legal name, date of birth, current and previous addresses, Social Insurance Number, phone number and signature, plus photocopies of two pieces of government-issued identification (never originals), at least one showing your current address, to National Consumer Relations, Equifax Canada Co., Box 190 Jean Talon Station, Montreal, Quebec H1S 2Z2. It takes roughly seven to ten business days.

Two things to expect. First, the free mail-in disclosure contains the same account-level detail as any paid product — the paid versions add monitoring, alerts and score tracking, not more data. Second, the free report does not include a score. The score is calculated from the file, and a free app that shows you a weekly number is showing you a calculation, not the file itself.

Pull TransUnion Canada too, at least once. The two bureaus keep separate files, and a lender that reports to one may not report to the other, so an account or a collection can appear on one report and not the other. Which one matters depends on who is about to look at you — most Canadian mortgage lenders, banks and tenant-screening services pull Equifax, which is the reasoning behind choosing which bureau to strengthen first.

What to check first when you read an Equifax credit report in Canada

Check the personal information section first, before you look at a single account. This is where files get mixed up, and a merged file is the most damaging error on the report because it imports somebody else's accounts wholesale.

Look for four things: name variations you do not recognise, addresses you have never lived at, a date of birth that is wrong by a digit, and a Social Insurance Number that is not yours. Any one of them means either a data-entry error or that Equifax has stitched your file to someone with a similar name, and the fix is a dispute, not a note to yourself.

Then read the rest in order and resist the urge to jump to the score. The five factors that produce the number — payment history at roughly 35%, utilization at 30%, length of history at 15%, credit mix at 10% and new inquiries at 10% — are all visible as raw lines in the sections below, and the way those five factors interact is what turns lines into a number between 300 and 900.

How do you read the account lines and the R1–R9 ratings?

Each account line carries a rating, a balance, a limit and a set of dates, and the rating is the part lenders read first. The letter describes the type of credit: R for revolving (credit cards), I for instalment (a car loan, a credit-builder loan), M for mortgage, O for open. The number describes how you paid.

Rating	What it means	What a lender reads
R0	Approved but not yet used	No history to judge
R1	Paid as agreed, within 30 days of the due date	The target. Every line should say this.
R2	30 to 59 days late	A slip. Recoverable, but visible for years.
R3	60 to 89 days late	A pattern is forming.
R4	90 to 119 days late	Most prime lenders decline on sight.
R5	120 days or more late, not yet written off	The account is effectively in default.
R7	Paying under a consumer proposal or debt management plan	An arrangement, not a default — better than R9.
R8	Repossession	The asset was taken back.
R9	Written off as bad debt, sent to collections, or included in bankruptcy	The worst line on a report.

Beside the rating, read four fields on every account. The balance and the credit limit together give your utilization on that account, and the balance shown is whatever was outstanding on the day the lender reported — usually the statement date, not the day you paid. The date opened feeds length of history, which is why closing your oldest card is rarely the tidy move it feels like. The date of last activity starts the clock on how long a negative item stays. And the payment history grid shows the last several years month by month, so a single late payment three years ago is still sitting there in a column even when the current rating says R1.

A thin section here is its own kind of problem, and it is the gap an AvenaCredit membership is built to fill: the monthly payment is reported to Equifax Canada as an on-time payment on a real tradeline — here is how that reporting works — and Build and Boost members also get their rent and utilities reported, including up to two years of rent already paid on Boost.

What do collections and public records look like on the report?

A collection appears as its own entry naming the collection agency, the original creditor, the amount and the date the debt first went delinquent — and it stays even after you pay it, updated to show a zero balance. Paying a collection does not delete it. It does change what a lender sees from "outstanding" to "settled", which matters more than people expect on a mortgage application, and the date of first delinquency keeps running either way.

Public records is the shortest and heaviest section. A consumer proposal appears here and each included account usually drops to R7 while the proposal runs, then R9 when it completes. A bankruptcy appears with a filing date and a discharge date, and the discharge date is the one that starts the retention clock. Court judgments and registered secured loans show here too. If you are working through this stretch, the month-by-month version is in the guide to rebuilding after a consumer proposal.

Verify one thing here: that a completed proposal or a discharged bankruptcy actually says so, with the correct date. A file still showing an open proposal two years after you finished it is a common error, and worth more points than almost anything else you can dispute.

Which credit inquiries actually cost you points?

Only hard inquiries count, and they are about 10% of the score. A hard inquiry is recorded when you apply for credit and a lender pulls your file; a soft inquiry is recorded when you check your own report, when an existing lender reviews your account, or when a company pre-screens you for an offer. Soft inquiries are visible only to you and never affect the score.

Read the inquiry list for two things: applications you do not remember making — the earliest signal of identity theft — and clusters. Five card applications in a month reads as distress to a scoring model even if you were only comparison-shopping. Rate-shopping a mortgage or car loan inside a short window is treated more gently.

If you find inquiries you did not authorise, you can now lock the file in some provinces. Quebec residents have had a free credit freeze since February 2023 under the province's Credit Assessment Agents Act. Ontario followed on 1 July 2026 under the Better for Consumers, Better for Businesses Act, with free Equifax credit locks and TransUnion required to offer the same by 1 July 2027. Elsewhere in Canada a fraud alert is the available option, and what Ontario residents can do about their credit file is the fullest version of these rights so far.

How long does each item stay on your Equifax file?

Most negative information drops off six years after the date of last activity, though the exact period varies by province and by item type. These are the periods to check against your own report:

1. Late payments: six years from the date of last activity on that account.
2. Collections: six years from the date the debt first went delinquent — not from the day you paid it.
3. Consumer proposal: three years after completion, or six years from filing, whichever comes first.
4. First bankruptcy: six years from discharge; a second or subsequent bankruptcy stays fourteen years.
5. Court judgments: six to seven years from the judgment date, depending on the province.
6. Hard inquiries: visible for about three years, but weighted heavily only in the first twelve months.
7. Closed accounts in good standing: kept for several years after closing, and they help while they last.

Anything past its retention date should be disputed rather than waited out. But the clock matters less than most people assume, because scoring models weight recent behaviour far more heavily than old behaviour. A clean twelve months of reported payments changes the score long before a six-year-old collection falls away on its own.

What to do when the report is wrong — or nearly empty

Dispute an error directly with Equifax Canada, in writing, with proof. You can file online and attach up to three documents, or mail the dispute form to National Consumer Relations at the Montreal address above; online disputes take roughly 15 to 20 days and mailed ones 20 to 25. Personal-information disputes need two pieces of government ID and a proof of address under 90 days old; account disputes need a bank statement or a letter from the creditor. If the investigation goes against you and you still disagree, you can add a free 800-character consumer statement to the file, which every lender who pulls the report will see. Your rights to access and correct this data come from PIPEDA federally and, in Quebec, from Law 25 — neither is optional for a bureau.

The other outcome is more common and harder to solve: the report is accurate and there is barely anything on it. No error to dispute, no negative item to age off, just three or four sparse lines. That file gets declined for the same reason a damaged one does — the lender has nothing to trust. What fixes it is reported, on-time payments arriving month after month, which is exactly what an AvenaCredit membership adds without a credit check and without borrowing. Starter is $24.99 a month and reports a $1,000 tradeline to Equifax Canada; Build is $34.99 for a $1,500 tradeline plus rent and utility reporting; Boost is $84.99 for a $3,000 tradeline, rent and utility reporting, a two-year rent backdate, one-on-one guidance and the secured card free. Members gain an average of 71 points after 12 months. If your report is thin rather than damaged, Starter is usually the right place to begin — see what each plan reports.

And the honest caveat: if your report already shows three or more accounts reporting on time with balances under 30% of their limits, you do not need another tradeline. Put the money against a card balance instead. The report tells you which situation you are in, which is the whole reason to read it.

Common questions

Does checking your own Equifax report lower your score?

No. Checking your own file is a soft inquiry, and soft inquiries are never counted in the score. Only hard inquiries, recorded when a lender pulls your file after a credit application, affect it — and those are worth roughly 10% of the calculation. Check your own report as often as you like.

Is the free Equifax report the same as the paid one?

The free mail-in consumer disclosure contains the same account-level detail as the paid products: every tradeline, rating, collection, public record and inquiry. What it does not include is your credit score, and it does not come with monitoring or alerts. Paid products add speed and monitoring, not additional information about your file.

Why is my TransUnion report different from my Equifax report?

Because lenders choose which bureaus to report to, and many report to only one. An account, a collection or an inquiry can therefore appear on one file and not the other, and each bureau calculates its own score from its own data. Two different numbers is normal, not an error.

What does R1 mean on a credit report?

R1 means a revolving account paid as agreed, within 30 days of the due date. The letter identifies the credit type — R revolving, I instalment, M mortgage, O open — and the number runs from 1 to 9, where 9 means the debt was written off, sent to collections or included in a bankruptcy.

How long does it take to fix an error on an Equifax report?

Roughly 15 to 20 days for a dispute filed online and 20 to 25 days for one sent by mail, after which Equifax sends a written result. Supply the proof up front — a statement, a creditor letter, a discharge certificate — because a dispute without evidence is usually returned unchanged.

Read the report once a year, and read it in full rather than glancing at the score. If the accounts look fine but the number still feels low, the problem is usually the balance that was sitting there on your statement date. If there is barely anything on the file at all, work out first whether you have a thin file or a damaged one, because they need opposite fixes — then compare the three plans and pick the one that reports what your file is missing.