What we do · Disputes
Disputing inaccurate items
A dispute is a formal statement that something in your file is wrong, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act obliges a bureau to investigate it, generally within thirty days. It is free, you can file it yourself, and it is the only mechanism that removes anything from a credit report early.
- What it costs
- $35 per item, per bureau
- When you are invoiced
- Invoiced once the investigation has been answered, whatever the answer is.
- How long
- Each dispute runs on a 30-day statutory clock
What can be disputed, and what cannot
Anything inaccurate, incomplete or unverifiable. An account that is not yours. A balance that is wrong. A payment marked late that was made on time. A date that has been re-aged. A collection listed twice because it changed hands. A discharged bankruptcy debt still showing a balance.
Not: an accurate late payment, an accurate charge-off, an accurate collection, an accurate bankruptcy. Those stay until they age off, and disputing them anyway is how a file gets flagged for frivolous disputes, at which point the one real tool you had stops working.
Both ends, not one
Most people dispute with the bureau and stop there. The bureau forwards a summary of your dispute to the furnisher electronically, the furnisher checks it against its own record, and if its own record says the same thing, the item comes back "verified".
Disputing directly with the furnisher as well, under §623, puts the same evidence in front of the party that actually holds the underlying account. It has its own statutory duty to investigate, and it must not resume reporting information it found to be inaccurate. In our experience this single habit is the difference between most disputes that work and most that do not.
- A short, specific letter naming one item and one reason. Not a template, not a list of forty entries.
- Copies — never originals — of anything that proves the point: a payoff letter, a bank statement, a discharge order, a police report.
- Sent certified with return receipt, so the thirty-day clock has a start date you can prove.
- The same package to the furnisher, on the same day.
The bureau generally has 30 days from receipt, extendable to 45 if you send further information part way through. If it misses the deadline the item must be deleted. Keep the certified receipt; it is the only thing that establishes when the clock started.
Reading the answer properly
Deleted means gone — check the other two bureaus, because a deletion does not travel. Updated means something changed but the item stays, and this is often the real win: a corrected first-delinquency date can pull years off how long an entry lingers.
Verified means the furnisher stood behind it. If the item is accurate, that is the end and we will tell you so. If the investigation was plainly inadequate — a form response that did not engage with what you sent — the next steps are a second dispute with the new evidence, a hundred-word statement on the file, a complaint to the CFPB, and in a serious case a conversation with a consumer attorney about a private right of action.
Nobody here is going to tell you off.
The first conversation is free, it takes about half an hour, and it ends with you knowing what is actually on your file and what can honestly be done about it. If the answer is "nothing we can charge for", we will tell you that, and you will still get the plan.
Not ready to talk to anyone? Take the guide and do it yourself. It is the same method, it costs nothing, and you never have to tell us you used it.