Denied an apartment and nobody told you why?
Here is the part almost nobody knows: evictions and rental history do not appear on your credit report. They sit on tenant screening reports, kept by companies most renters have never heard of. If you have been searching your credit file for the thing that is blocking your applications, you have been looking in the wrong place.
What a landlord actually sees
When you apply for a flat, the landlord usually does not pull your credit report themselves. They order a tenant screening report from a specialist company. That report can contain:
- Eviction filings and landlord-tenant lawsuits — including cases that were dismissed
- Your credit history
- Criminal records and sex offender registry checks
- Employment and income verification
- A risk score or a flat recommendation generated from criteria the landlord chose
Figures from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s 2022 study of the tenant background check market.
- Paying your rent on time for years is recorded on almost none of these reports.
- A single eviction filing — even one you won, settled, or had dismissed — is recorded on nearly all of them.
Why a dismissed eviction still follows you
Eviction records start life as court filings. There are more than thirteen thousand courts producing them, and screening companies generally do not read the courthouse file.
Instead, as the CFPB describes it, they buy the records in bulk from data brokers who compile court data into central databases and only periodically refresh them. Manual verification costs money — the CFPB put it at around seven dollars per check against nearly nothing for the automated route.
That pipeline produces two predictable errors, and they are the two that ruin applications:
- The case that ended in your favour still shows as an eviction. The filing was captured; the dismissal never was.
- Someone else’s record is attached to you because the names are similar. The CFPB has stated that matching consumer records by name alone is illegal.
This is not a theoretical complaint. In October 2023 the CFPB and FTC took action against TransUnion’s rental screening arm over eviction record accuracy, resulting in $11 million in consumer redress and a $4 million civil penalty. AppFolio settled with the FTC for $4.25 million in 2020 over its screening and matching practices.
The ten companies that may hold a file on you
These are the tenant screening agencies listed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Details verified against the CFPB register and each company’s own consumer pages.
| Company | Free annual file? | How to request |
|---|---|---|
| SafeRent Solutions | Yes | (888) 333-2413 · P.O. Box 3890, Coppell, TX 75019. Form-based, no online portal. Will also freeze your file on request. |
| Experian RentBureau | Yes | (877) 704-4519 · P.O. Box 26, Allen, TX 75013. Mail the form with photo ID and a utility bill. |
| RealPage / LeasingDesk | Yes | (866) 934-1124 · 2201 Lakeside Blvd, Richardson, TX 75082. Online DocuSign form. |
| First Advantage | Yes | 800-845-6004 · P.O. Box 105292, Atlanta, GA 30348. Also freezes on request. Extra free copies if you were denied in the last 60 days, are unemployed, or receive public assistance. |
| AmRent | Yes | (888) 898-6196 · P.O. Box 530091, Atlanta, GA 30353. Downloadable form only. |
| Contemporary Information Corp (CIC) | Eviction report only | 888-316-4242 · Portal at consumers.cicreports.com. Free housing-court record once every 12 months. The portal requires a Social Security number and will not accept an ITIN. |
| TransUnion Rental Screening | Conditional | 800-230-9376 · P.O. Box 800, Woodlyn, PA 19094. Routed through a dispute team rather than a disclosure team. |
| RentGrow (a Yardi company) | Free, not annual | (800) 898-1351 · 177 Huntington Ave, Ste 1703 #74213, Boston, MA 02115. The screening report comes quickly; the full consumer file can take 60 days. |
| AppFolio | Free, not annual | (866) 359-3630 · Online form at screenings.appfolio.com. Cannot freeze — they are not a nationwide credit bureau. |
| Screening Reports, Inc. | Only if they screened you | 954-526-6110 · 2900 Monarch Lakes Blvd, Ste 201, Miramar, FL 33027. |
If you were denied and given the name of a company that is not on this list, that company still owes you a copy. The list is the CFPB’s, and it is not exhaustive.
Two separate rights to a free copy
The annual disclosure
Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a company that keeps files nationwide on residential or tenant history is a nationwide specialty consumer reporting agency, and must give you one free copy of your file every twelve months when you ask. That is the statutory basis. In practice the companies word it inconsistently — the table above reflects what each one actually commits to.
The adverse action copy
This is the stronger right and the one people forget. If you were denied a flat, charged a higher deposit, or required to find a co-signer because of a screening report, the landlord must tell you the name, address and phone number of the company that produced it. You then have 60 days to request a free copy directly, and the company must provide it within 15 days.
- Ask the landlord or letting agent which screening company they used. They are obliged to tell you.
- Request your file from that company inside 60 days — free, and faster than the annual route.
- Requesting your own report never affects your credit scores.
How long an eviction can be reported
An eviction is a civil suit, so the seven-year limit under the Fair Credit Reporting Act applies — with one wrinkle worth knowing: the law says seven years or until the governing statute of limitations expires, whichever is longer. Where a state gives a judgment a longer life, the record can lawfully outlast seven years.
A filing that never became a judgment still falls under the seven-year rule as an adverse item. Criminal convictions have no federal time limit, though several states impose their own seven-year cap.
Some states go further on evictions specifically, with sealing laws, shorter look-back periods, or outright bans on reporting dismissed cases. Those rules vary enough that it is worth checking your own state rather than assuming.
If something on it is wrong
- Get the report first. You cannot dispute precisely what you have not read.
- Gather the court paperwork. A dismissal order, a satisfaction of judgment, or a docket printout is what settles a wrong eviction entry. Court records are usually public and often free to obtain.
- Dispute in writing, and send it so you can prove you sent it. Certified mail with return receipt converts “I disputed this” into a documented date.
- Keep everything. Every letter, every envelope, every date.
- Disputes must be investigated free of charge. Nobody may bill you for correcting their error.
If a company verifies something you know to be wrong, or ignores the documentation you sent, that is the point at which it stops being an administrative problem and becomes a legal one.
Where to read more. Our plain account of what actually happens when you file these requests yourself covers the specialty agencies we work with, and FCRAViolations.com explains what the law requires when a dispute comes back “verified” and the information is still wrong.
Being straight with you
Tenant screening agencies are not currently part of what we file for clients. Our service covers ten specialty consumer reporting agencies — ChexSystems, LexisNexis, Innovis, CoreLogic Teletrack and the rest — and rental screening companies are a separate group with their own processes.
We wrote this page because the question kept coming up and the honest answer was hard to find. Everything above you can do yourself, for free, and there is nothing here we are charging for.
If the problem turns out to sit in one of the agencies we do cover, we are glad to help with that. If it does not, the contact details above are all you need.