Rent reporting is sold on numbers. Some of those numbers are out of date, some come from companies selling the service, and one of the most widely repeated cannot be traced to any study at all.
This page collects what the evidence actually shows, with every figure dated and linked to its source. Where the research disagrees, we show the disagreement rather than picking the most flattering number. You should not have to take anyone’s word for this, including ours.
Last reviewed: August 11, 2026. Next review: November 2026.
How many people can’t get a credit score?
The most-quoted figure in rent reporting is out of date
You will still see “26 million Americans are credit invisible” across this industry. That figure comes from a 2015 CFPB report, and the CFPB corrected it in June 2025.
The corrected numbers: 5.8% of US adults, or 13.5 million, were credit invisible in 2010, not the 11% and 25.9 million originally published. By 2020 it had fallen further, to 2.7%, roughly 7 million of 258 million adults.
The revision came from moving to a more complete data source, which captured records that had previously been missed: accounts holding only deferred student loans, collections, or closed accounts.
Source: CFPB Office of Research, Technical correction and update to the CFPB’s credit invisibles estimate, June 2025.
The bigger problem is being unscorable, not invisible
The same correction moved the other number upward. Adults with a credit record that cannot produce a score went from a published 8.3% for 2010 to a corrected 12.7%, and stood at 9.8% in 2020, around 25 million people.
So the picture inverts. Far fewer people have no credit file at all than the industry usually claims, and far more have a file that exists but cannot be scored, either because it is stale with no recent activity (5.9% of adults in 2020) or because it holds too little information (3.9%). If you are not sure which describes you, our guide to reading your credit report walks through how to check.
This distinction matters for rent reporting. Adding a rent tradeline to a thin or stale file is a different proposition from building a file from nothing, and it is by far the larger group.
Source: as above, Table 2.
Does rent reporting actually raise a credit score?
The only randomized trial found no significant change in average score
In June 2025 the Urban Institute published the first randomized controlled trial of rent reporting. Renters were randomly assigned either to have their rent reported straight away or to a waitlist four months behind, and the two groups were compared.
What it found:
- The share of the treatment group with no credit score at all halved, from 16% to 8%
- Among those whose rent was actually reported, the likelihood of having a credit score rose by 12 percentage points
- Among the same group, the likelihood of reaching near-prime, a score of 601 or better, rose by 25 percentage points
- No statistically significant effect on reaching prime (661 or better)
- No statistically significant effect on average credit score among people who already had one
The authors are open about the limits: “The sample size in this study is too small to rule out modestly sized impacts.” The trial covered 269 renters.
What this means in practice. Rent reporting is a way of getting onto the credit map, and of crossing the threshold into near-prime. The evidence does not show it lifting a score that already exists. If you already have an established credit file, this may not be the thing that moves it, and that is worth knowing before you start.
Source: Brett Theodos, Daniel Teles, with Samuel Leiberman, Evaluating Rent Reporting as a Pathway to Build Credit, Urban Institute, June 2025. Funded by the National Endowment for Financial Education.
Who was actually studied
The trial ran across six nonprofit affordable-housing providers, with residents generally on below-market or subsidized rents, enrolled in two waves in the summers of 2021 and 2022.
So the strongest evidence for rent reporting comes from tenants in subsidized housing. Whether the same results hold for renters generally has not been tested. That is worth knowing before anyone quotes the findings at you, and that includes us.
Where the numbers disagree, and why
Four different answers to the same question circulate widely. They are not equally supported.
| Claim | Source | Date | Interest |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Up to 150 points” | A syndicated TV news segment quoting an unnamed expert | June 2026 | Traces to no study |
| Around 60 points on average | TransUnion | July 2021 | Sells rent reporting |
| 53 points on average | Esusu (has also published 51, and 36) | Various | Sells rent reporting |
| No significant change in average score | Urban Institute randomized trial | June 2025 | Independent, NEFE-funded |
The 150-point figure cannot be traced to a study
It is usually attributed to VantageScore. VantageScore’s own analysis, covering more than 600,000 renters and published in November 2025, makes no individual point-increase claim at all.
What it actually reports is that adding rental history improves default prediction by up to 11%, and that nearly four million renters could reach a score of 620 and become mortgage-eligible. There is no 150 anywhere in it.
The number appears to originate in a June 2026 television segment quoting an unnamed expert, carried word-for-word across a chain of local stations, and has been repeated since as though it were research.
Source: VantageScore, New Analysis Finds Millions of Renters Become Mortgage-Eligible, November 5, 2025.
The 60-point figure is real, but old, and from a seller
TransUnion reported that consumers saw “an average increase of nearly 60 points” when rent payments were included in their credit file. It also found around 9% of unscorable consumers became scorable with an average score of 631, and 12% moved into a higher score tier.
Three things belong beside it. The analysis uses data through March 2021. TransUnion sells rent reporting. And the release does not say which consumers the 60-point average is drawn from, whether everyone studied or only those whose scores changed.
Source: TransUnion, Alternative Data Such as Rent Payment Reporting Bridges the Gap for Unscorable Consumers, July 15, 2021.
The vendor figure that keeps moving
Esusu, a rent reporting platform, currently markets an average increase of 53 points. It has previously published 51, and its 2023 year in review reported 36 points or more over the length of enrollment. A figure that moves this much is a good reason to treat all such numbers as indicative rather than precise.
Why the independent trial finds less
The vendor analyses and the randomized trial are not quite measuring the same thing.
Vendor figures typically look at people who signed up and stayed enrolled, then report the change observed. A randomized trial compares everyone assigned to reporting against a control group, including the people for whom it did not work out. That is what makes the comparison fair, and it is also what makes the number smaller.
Both can be honest and still disagree. For working out what a particular renter should expect, the trial is the better guide.
Numbers that travel further than their evidence are not unique to rent reporting. We have written about the same pattern elsewhere in credit myths that quietly cost renters money.
The advertised number and the tested number are not the same number.
Who does rent reporting help, and who does it not?
On the evidence, it helps most if you have no credit file, or a thin one. The trial’s clearest results were people gaining a score for the first time, and people crossing into near-prime.
It appears to do little for people who already have an established score. The trial found no significant effect on average score among those who already had one, and no significant effect on reaching prime.
If your file cannot be scored because it is stale rather than thin, meaning no recent activity rather than too little history, a current rent tradeline adds exactly the kind of regular payment data a scoring model looks for. That is reasoning from how scoring works rather than a tested finding, and we flag it as such.
Fewer than a third of people who signed up were in a position to benefit
This is the trial’s own conclusion, not our gloss:
In total, less than one-third of people who signed up were ideally situated to benefit from rent reporting.
Three things account for the gap. About one in four who signed up could not enroll at all, often because they were not the leaseholder on the housing provider’s records or hit an administrative problem. Of those who did enroll, about two in five already had a score above 601, so any improvement was likely to be minimal. And about one in three of those effectively enrolled never had rent reported during the study.
In the study’s own figures: 27% of people who signed up were either ineligible or faced enrollment problems, and of those who were eligible and enrolled, 30% had no rent reported during the research period.
That last group deserves explanation rather than blame. Data provided by Esusu, the platform used in the trial, showed roughly three-quarters of those tenants were active and ready to report. The likely reason nothing was reported is that no rent was paid in the period, either a missed payment or housing assistance covering the full amount. About a quarter were blocked by an administrative issue such as a missing Social Security number.
The researchers’ conclusion is worth quoting in full, because it is also the clearest description of who should bother: rent reporting “can be very beneficial to a segment of tenants who are eligible to have their rent reported, have no or low credit scores, and pay their rent on time.”
The honest summary: rent reporting is a way onto the map, not a way up the league table.
How much of the rental market actually reports rent?
Adoption has grown quickly, from a very low base.
The share of renter households with any rent payment reported went from about 3% in 2020 to about 13% in 2024, a quadrupling in four years.
The more useful figure is smaller. Households actively participating went from about 2% to about 7% over the same period. The headline 13% is roughly double the number of renters actually building credit this way at any given time.
VantageScore gives a similar figure, describing 13% as the share of renters who “currently benefit from positive rental reporting in their credit reports.” It is worth noting that this is not fully independent confirmation. The Urban Institute’s counts are built on TransUnion data, and VantageScore’s analysis used data from Esusu. Both ultimately trace back to the industry, because the industry is currently the only source of these numbers.
Sources: Urban Institute, The Rise of Rent Reporting as a Credit-Building Tool, November 6, 2025, using TransUnion data with US Census Bureau and American Community Survey estimates; and VantageScore, November 2025.
What can go wrong
Rent reporting is not automatically good for renters. The strongest criticism of it comes from the National Consumer Law Center, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a footnote.
Rent reporting risks helping some better-off credit invisible consumers at the cost of literally making other renters homeless.
That is the National Consumer Law Center’s argument, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a footnote.
The mechanism is specific, and worth understanding. Landlords screen tenants using credit reports, often bundled with eviction and criminal records. Many landlords will not rent to anyone with any record of a late rent payment, or will ask for a prohibitively large deposit. A late credit card payment is something a landlord may look past. A late rent payment is not.
So a service that reports missed payments alongside on-time ones does not merely risk costing a renter some points. It can cost them their next home.
NCLC makes two recommendations, and we think they are right:
- Positive-only reporting. Only on-time payments should ever be sent to the credit bureaus.
- Opt-in only. Never opt-out, never mandatory, never switched on by a landlord on a tenant’s behalf.
Both matter because neither is universal. NCLC notes that a California law requiring subsidized housing providers to offer rent reporting has been interpreted to require full-file reporting, including negative information.
Source: National Consumer Law Center, Even the Catch-22s Come with Catch-22s: Potential Harms and Drawbacks of Rent Reporting, October 2022.
How RentRX is set up
This page is published by a company that sells rent reporting, so here is exactly how ours works. You can hold it to the standard above.
- Positive-only. Only on-time rent payments are reported. A missed or late payment is never sent to the credit bureaus. Using RentRX cannot lower your score through a missed rent payment.
- Opt-in. You choose to switch it on. A landlord cannot enroll you.
- Equifax. We report to one bureau, not three, and that is a real limitation worth stating plainly. Your improved file shows up when a lender or landlord pulls Equifax, and not when they pull Experian or TransUnion. Several other services do report to all three. If that is the thing that matters most to you, it is a fair reason to choose one of them over us.
- Past rent payments can be reported, so a record you have already built can count. We are not going to put a number of months on that until we can point to where the number comes from.
These are the safeguards NCLC asks for, and the configuration the Urban Institute trial tested. We would rather tell you that than quote you a number.
Sources and method
How this page is put together:
- Every figure comes from the primary document, not from a summary of it.
- Every figure carries its date and a link to the source.
- Where estimates conflict, we show the range and explain why they differ, rather than choosing the most flattering one.
- Where a widely-quoted figure has been superseded, we say so and give the replacement.
- Limitations sit next to findings: sample size, who was studied, who paid for the research.
- Where a source sells the thing it is measuring, we say so. That includes us.
- We do not tell you what will happen to your credit score. We tell you what the research found.
Full source list
- CFPB Office of Research, Technical correction and update to the CFPB’s credit invisibles estimate, June 2025
- CFPB, CFPB Report Finds 26 Million Consumers Are Credit Invisible, May 2015, superseded by the above
- Urban Institute, Evaluating Rent Reporting as a Pathway to Build Credit, June 2025
- Urban Institute, The Rise of Rent Reporting as a Credit-Building Tool, November 2025
- TransUnion, Alternative Data Such as Rent Payment Reporting Bridges the Gap for Unscorable Consumers, July 2021
- VantageScore, New Analysis Finds Millions of Renters Become Mortgage-Eligible, November 2025
- National Consumer Law Center, Even the Catch-22s Come with Catch-22s, October 2022
Corrections. If something here is wrong or has been superseded, tell us. We will fix it and note what changed.
Last reviewed: August 11, 2026. Next review: November 2026.