Free Full Credit Report

Credit reports are sold. Lenders pay to pull them, and the bureaus sell monitoring subscriptions to individuals. The Free Full Credit Report is the carve-out: RBI has directed the credit information companies to furnish one complete report, including the credit score, to every individual borrower once in a calendar year, free.

The word full is the point of the rule. The borrower is entitled to the same report the financial institutions see when they check their credit details — not a summary, not a score on its own. Anything less would leave the borrower unable to check what lenders are actually reading.

And because the report can contain mistakes — a closed loan still shown as open, a payment recorded as missed — the rule also requires that the report enable the borrower to get those errors rectified.

The entitlement is per bureau, per calendar year. India has four credit information companies — CIBIL, Experian, CRIF High Mark and Equifax — and an individual is entitled to a free copy of their credit report every year from each of them.

The year runs January to December. It is a calendar year, not a rolling twelve months from the last request and not a financial year.

What the report contains: the credit score, plus the details of the latest outstanding loans. Typically it shows repayment history for the last two to three years, and the details of loans the client has serviced, missed payments on, or settled.

Format: the report can be accessed in electronic format, directly from the bureau's website using the individual's own login.

Sunita intends to apply for a home loan in about eighteen months and wants her record clean before she does.

She uses the entitlement the way it is designed to be used — four free reports a year, one from each bureau, spaced across the calendar year:

Effectively quarterly monitoring for nothing, with the entitlement from each bureau resetting on 1 January.

The April report shows a Rs 1,80,000 two-wheeler loan she closed three years ago still recorded as live and outstanding. Two consequences follow, and both are measurable.

First, her debt-to-income ratio is overstated. On a monthly income of Rs 95,000 with genuine EMIs of Rs 21,000, her true DTI is 22%. With a phantom Rs 5,400 EMI still on the record, a lender computes Rs 26,400 / Rs 95,000 = 27.8%, and that is the figure it underwrites against.

Second, the phantom loan suppresses her score, and the score sets the rate. Getting it rectified — which the RBI rule expressly requires the report to enable — costs her nothing but a correction request and a few weeks.

Had she waited until the loan application to look, the error would have been discovered at the worst possible moment: with a builder's deadline running and no time to fix it.

Chapter 4 (Debt Management and Loans), section 4.4.1, under RBI's regulation about free credit score, and again in Chapter 5 (Introduction to Indian Financial Markets), where the workbook states that RBI has directed CICs to furnish the Free Full Credit Report including credit score to individual borrowers once in a calendar year. Questions test the frequency, the fact that the score is included, and that the year is a calendar year.

• Once a calendar year, from each bureau — so four free reports a year in practice, not one. The entitlement is per credit information company.
• January to December. Not a financial year, and not twelve months from the date of the last request.
• Full means full. The borrower gets the same report the lender sees, with the score included — not a score-only extract.
• Free is the floor, not the ceiling. Additional reports and continuous monitoring are chargeable products; the rule guarantees one.
• Rectification is part of the entitlement. The report must enable the borrower to correct wrong information and closed loans still shown as open.
• Be careful how you access it. The workbook warns that bureaus have tie-ups with loan providers and that one must be sure the tie-up is genuine and not an online scam harvesting personal information. The safe route is the bureau's own site.