 TITLE: What Kinds of Bills Affect Credit Scores? CONTENT: How Service Accounts Can Now Impact Credit\n------------------------------------------\nDesigners of credit scoring models have long known that a pattern of timely payments on any bills—not just bills for loans and credit cards—indicate financial discipline and good money management habits. A number of existing scoring models, including FICO® Score 8, are designed to take non-debt payments such as those for phones, utilities, and cable service into account if they appear on your credit report.\nHistorically, that has been a very big \"if.\" Very few individuals have seen credit score benefits from service payment data because very few phone, utility and cable providers share payment information with the national credit bureaus. When they do, they tend to benefit your FICO® Score 8 credit score.\nA new free program called Experian Boost™† aims to change that. If you enroll in the Boost program and allow Experian to securely access your online utility and telecom payment history, payments on authorized accounts will begin appearing on your Experian credit report and your FICO® Score may get a boost. Enrolling in Boost also gives you access to your Experian credit report and FICO® Scores, so you can track your progress.\nThe exact increase will vary, depending on the nature of your credit history, and some Boost users will see no change in score or even a decrease. Boost only considers on-time payments, so the occasional late payment won't affect your credit score.\nKeep in mind, however, that—unrelated to the Boost program—if you fail to pay your bill to the extent that your provider closes your account and pursues back payments through a collections process, that will be noted on your credit file and could severely reduce your credit scores. (If you have concerns about any of your utility or phone bills, you can remove them from Boost at any time.) Also, note that not all lenders use FICO® Scores for lending decisions and that Boost will not affect any credit scores based on data from credit bureaus other than Experian. END