The good news: you used to have to send physical letters to each bureau to dispute a credit item. No more. Now you can file disputes entirely online with all three bureaus.

The bad news: you still have to file disputes with each bureau (assuming they’re all reporting the same item).

Okay there’s more bad news: filing credit disputes is not the magic credit score fix you might have heard it is. It can help, and if you have truly incorrect stuff on your credit report, then by all means file disputes (or have someone like us file them for you). But remember that real credit repair is more than just filing disputes. All of that said, if you’re doing it, here’s what you need to know:

File disputes here:

Experian

Transunion

Equifax

Consider going directly to the original debtor.

If it’s a debt item, in some cases you can go directly to the original lender/debtor to dispute the credit report item. If they agree it’s in error, you can get them to report it differently to the credit bureaus. This is actually the preferable route – it’s less headache and quicker in the end. But if you do need to file a dispute…

You don’t need dispute letters.

With their online disputes, the bureaus will ask you for a little bit of supporting information, but you don’t need an entire letter.

The bureaus will rarely be late responding to you.

And even if they are, there’s not much you can do about it. You can file a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but your best case scenario there is the credit bureaus get a slap on the wrist. So if you’ve heard that you can get things removed from your credit report because a bureau is a day late responding to you, it’s generally not true.

If you have a successful dispute, check your report to make sure the item is changed or removed

First off, know that it can take a little time for the credit report update to happen – sometimes multiple months. This is one reason why you need to have a good credit score/report provider that will let you refresh your report every month to check (your free annual report from annualcreditreport.com is only once per year) For ongoing monitoring of all three bureaus we recommend MyScoreIQ. It costs money for monthly 3-bureau reporting (any of the good ones do) but if you work with us to repair your credit, we refund or deeply discount the monthly fee.

Get help filing disputes if you need it

If you have a large number of disputable items, you may want to consider a paid credit repair companies. They all (ourselves included) have very efficient automated dispute systems in place.