The three nationwide credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, have made weekly free credit reports a permanent feature. The Federal Trade Commission says the bureaus “have permanently extended a program that lets you check your credit report from each once a week for free.”

That is a big change from the old rule of one free report per bureau per year. A report is the record of every credit card, loan and account opened in a person’s name, and it is where a stranger’s fraud usually shows up first. Checking it weekly means a problem can surface in days instead of months.

Where do the free weekly reports come from?

All three bureaus deliver the reports through one website, AnnualCreditReport.com. The FTC’s consumer page says it is the only website authorized to fill orders for the free reports, and it warns people not to go to the bureaus’ own sites for them. Lookalike sites that ask for a card number or push a paid “monitoring” trial are the usual trap.

Each bureau keeps its own file, and the files do not always match. A lender might report to Equifax and TransUnion but not Experian, so an account can appear on one report and be missing from another. Because the program now covers all three bureaus every week, a person can pull one report at a time and rotate through them, or pull all three at once.

Who gains the most from checking every week?

Anyone on a fixed income who cannot afford a surprise debt gains most. Retirees and people on Social Security or Medicare are frequent targets of identity theft, because thieves know a long credit history is worth more. A new credit card, a store account or a loan in a retiree’s name can run up charges for months before a collection notice arrives in the mail.

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Weekly access changes that timeline. A person who looks once a month, or even once a quarter, can now catch a new account within a few weeks of it being opened. The FTC page lists a second reason to look: the law behind the free reports lets consumers dispute any mistakes on a report, and the agency says to contact both the credit bureau and the business that supplied the information.

What should be done when a report shows an account nobody opened?

This is the point where the free reports turn into a decision: if a weekly report shows a card, loan or address that does not belong, the person who spots it has to choose how to lock the file down and which bureau to call first. The free route starts at AnnualCreditReport.com, where the report lists each account and the bureau holding it, and the next steps come from the FTC’s credit freeze and fraud alert guidance.

How do a freeze and a fraud alert differ?

The FTC’s page on credit freezes and fraud alerts says there is no cost to place or lift a credit freeze. A freeze blocks new credit from being opened in a person’s name, and it lasts until the person lifts it. The agency says the request goes to all three bureaus: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

A fraud alert works differently. An initial alert lasts one year and can be renewed, and the bureau a person contacts must tell the other two. An extended alert lasts seven years but requires an FTC identity theft report or a police report. The FTC notes that, unlike a freeze, a fraud alert does not stop businesses from seeing the credit report. It only requires lenders to verify identity first. Both are free.

The FTC’s free reports page also lists a fraud alert on a credit file as one reason a person can get an extra free report, so the weekly program and the protection tools work together.

Is a weekly look enough to catch fraud?

A report shows accounts and inquiries, not every kind of theft. It will not show a stolen Social Security number used for a tax refund or a fake benefits claim. It will show a new loan, a card opened under a retiree’s name, or a hard inquiry from a lender the person never contacted. Each of those is a prompt to freeze the file and start a written record.

The FTC page gives the dependable starting rule: use AnnualCreditReport.com, and nowhere else, for the free reports. The FTC describes the extension as permanent. The open question for most households is not access, since the reports are free and weekly, but whether anyone is actually looking, and what they will do the day an unfamiliar account appears.

Found an account you did not open?

A weekly report only helps if the person reading it knows the next move. An unfamiliar account left alone can keep growing for weeks, and every bureau holds its own copy of the damage until a freeze is in place.

The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit walks through the free credit-freeze steps, bureau by bureau, so the first call is not a guess. It also includes a fraud evidence and report log for keeping track of every account, date and call.

Get the credit-freeze steps and fraud report log in the Senior Fraud Defense kit →

More Financial Reading

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• 15 Ways Out of 22% Credit Card Interest

This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.