How to Compare Credit Monitoring Services

The free baseline

If a paid service's pitch is mostly things on this list, it is not adding much.

• Free reports from all three bureaus at annualcreditreport.com, the federally authorized source.
• A free credit freeze at each bureau, which blocks new accounts in your name.
• Free score access from many credit card issuers and banks.

What a paid plan can legitimately add

• Daily monitoring across all three bureaus rather than one.
• Alerts on inquiries and new accounts, in close to real time.
• Dark web scanning for your details.
• Identity restoration help, and sometimes insurance for costs of recovering from theft.

Read these terms before you sign up

• The renewal price after any trial, and the exact date it converts.
• Whether the score shown is a FICO score or a different model. Lenders mostly use FICO, and other scores can differ by a lot.
• Whether monitoring covers one bureau or all three. One-bureau monitoring misses things.
• How to cancel. If the answer is a phone call only, factor that in.

Our position

We list credit products and earn a commission on some of them. That is a reason to read the terms yourself rather than take any ranking, including one on this site, as a substitute for the fine print.