Do Payday Loans Affect Your Credit Rating?

Find out how payday loans affect your credit rating and what implications they have for future loan applications.

Do Payday Loans Affect Your Credit Rating?

Payday loans are generally not reported to the top three national credit reporting companies, so they are unlikely to have an impact on your credit scores. Most store payday lenders do not take into account credit reports or traditional credit scores when deciding whether to approve a loan. As such, requesting a payday loan will not appear as a hard inquiry on your credit report and lenders will not notify credit reporting agencies when you receive one. Since these loans go unnoticed, they won't help or hurt your credit history if you pay them back as agreed.

Generally, payday loans are not listed on credit reports from TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax, the three major credit reporting agencies. However, some special credit reporting agencies may keep track of your payday loan history. Lenders may take this into consideration when you apply for loans in the future.

This Is How Payday Loans Affect Credit Rating

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If you don't pay back a payday loan, your file may enter the collection process and a debt collector can report your debt to major national credit bureaus. This is the only time that payday loans will affect your credit rating. If you get a payday loan and pay it on time, you won't have any issues. The answer is “no, with a small caveat”.

Payday cash advances are part of a subset of bad credit loans known as “loans without credit checks”. Since these lenders do not check your credit history during the application process, they also do not report your payment information to the credit bureaus. As with most loans, payday loans have implications for your credit rating which may affect your ability to get payday and other types of loans in the future. Payday loans are usually short-term loans with high interest rates that are supposed to be paid back in full on the next payday (or when you receive alternative income such as a pension or Social Security).

Depending on where you live, you can get a payday loan online or through a physical branch with a payday lender. Since payday loans and on-time payments are not reported to any of the three national credit bureaus - Equifax, Experian and TransUnion - there is no way these payday loans will help improve your score. The Military Lending Act (MLA) provides additional protections for military personnel, including a 36% Military Annual Percentage Rate (MAPR) cap for a range of credit products including payday loans, vehicle title loans, repayment plans, deposit advance loans, installment loans and open lines of credit without guarantee. Because payday lenders often don't perform a credit check, applying for a payday loan won't affect your credit score or show up on your credit report.

It may come as a surprise but people actually apply for a second payday loan (from another company) to pay off their first one.

Ebony Sandoe
Ebony Sandoe

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