Best Credit Repair Companies

Do you have bad credit?

You’re not alone. An estimated 53% of Americans have had some sort of application denied due to their credit score.

Bad credit can prevent you from accomplishing major life tasks — like taking out a mortgage or buying your first car. Or it can stop you from taking out student loans, vacationing with your family, or worse.

In the most extreme cases, bad credit can make it hard for you to live a normal life.

It’s no wonder people look for assistance when they’re trying to get out from under the specter of bad credit. Credit repair companies are agencies specifically designed to provide this assistance.

They can work with you as you try to repair your credit and negotiate with credit bureaus on your behalf. While they can’t fix your credit for you outright, they can help share the load and make the burden manageable as you take steps to recovery.

Let’s take a look at some top credit repair companies and explain why they might be a great fit for your financial needs.

Best Credit Repair Companies

There are plenty of companies out there that can legitimately rectify your credit. Here’s our take on the top credit repair companies available.

1. Credit Saint – Best Overall

Credit Saint is one of the best credit repair agencies you can find overall; they’ve really earned their name, as can be seen not only from our recommendation but from the A+ BBB rating they currently hold.

For starters, they’re priced pretty competitively, offering monthly packages between $79 and $120, although they do have some initial fees ranging between $99 and $195.

Still, they’re worth the asking price because they write custom arguments for all their clients. They don’t use pre-made templates when petitioning credit bureaus on your behalf; they’ll look at your situation individually and figure out a strategy that works best for your needs, then compose unique arguments to use on your creditors.

Even better, they offer a moneyback guarantee. You’ll be eligible for a refund if they can’t find any negative or questionable items to remove from your credit report within the first 90 days of your arrangement.

The packages offered are as follows:

• Polish, which helps to repair medium levels of credit. It basically covers up to five items on your credit report every cycle, so it’s great if you don’t have super bad credit but still want to make significant improvements
• Remodel, which costs a little more and has the firm challenge up to 10 items on your credit report. They’ll also tackle things like erroneous bankruptcies or repossessed items
• Clean Slate is the most expensive, but it provides the most aggressive credit repair services. The credit repair firm will challenge an unlimited number of credit items in every cycle. It can be a great choice if you have lots of potentially negative items on your credit report that you need to be taken care of

You’ll also find lots of other things to like, such as a personal advisory team, several informative online resources you can use to educate yourself, and regular progress reports. Figuring out whether their repair services are worth your time is easy thanks to this transparency. 

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2. Sky Blue – Best Value

Sky Blue is our runner-up for the top credit repair company. They simply offer a better value for money. They’ve been in the industry for a long time, so they have a great track record and plenty of experience that they can bring to handle your credit report needs.

They offer a single package that’s pretty affordable at $79 per month, plus an initial $79 review/setup fee. The firm will dispute up to 15 items on your report, or 5 items per credit reporting agency, every 35 days. The simplicity of this package — and numbers — put Sky Blue at the front of available options when it comes to credit repair.

They provide fantastic customer service that’s lauded by both customers on websites like the BBB, where Sky Blue has an A+ Rating. They provide all new subscribers with basic evaluations to show those new customers where they might be able to fix their credit report themselves without paying an extra cost.

They also provide a 90-day satisfaction guarantee, without extra conditions or fine print. If you want to find a credit repair service as a couple, you get a $39 per month discount, too (but only if you’re married). They also don’t require you to pay for credit reports, so you get free credit reports as an added bonus.

It’s easy to see why Sky Blue has such high marks considering its ease-of-use, simplistic pricing scheme, and excellent value-forward initiatives.

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3. CreditRepair.com – Easiest to Use

CreditRepair.com is an ideal credit repair agency if you don’t want to deal with complex websites or difficult-to-follow credit repair procedures. This company provides a straightforward service and user-friendly guidelines that make it easy to see their value, even if you aren’t very technically or financially inclined. You can see what they offer by signing up for a free consultation that requires no upfront fee on your part.

Signing up for the service will have you follow three major steps. The company first looks over your credit reports from all three bureaus, then begins to send letters challenging those disputes over the following week.

CreditRepair.com regularly follows up on those letters and will repeatedly challenge the same items over and over if needed. This can make them a great choice if you know that there are improper negative items on your credit report that bureaus may be unwilling to change because of bureaucratic legwork. Sometimes insistence is key, and this company provides it in spades.

The company also provides you with a way to easily follow their progress online through your account portal. Furthermore, their pricing is pretty decent at about $100 a month. They also give you free access to your credit report summary, which is a nice bonus in any credit repair agency.

Signing up for the service is easier than with many other companies, as you can fill out a mobile application on your phone or tablet. You can also use these devices to track your progress even while on the go.

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4. Lexington Law – Best Customer Reputation and Experience

Sometimes, the best credit repair agencies are those who have lots of experience. Lexington Law is one of those companies. They’ve been in business since 1991 but have focused on credit repair exclusively ever since 2004.

Supposedly, they’ve removed 10 million negative items from their customers’ credit reports just in 2017 – these are good predictions for further success.

All customers get to pick between three packages: basic, moderate, and advanced. Pricing ranges between $89.95 to $129.95. They also include a first work fee of the same price of whatever package you decide to pick.

A free consultation is provided, however, which is nice since things can get pretty pricy with both charges added together. Even better, they provide a 50% off discount if you are a veteran or active military. Furthermore, spouses get a one-time 50% discount when their partner signs up for their service.

Lexington Law provides a mobile app so you can check your progress reports on the go and keep in touch with the company as they represent your interests. They attach you to a personalized representative, so you can give them details about your situation and so they can figure out the best negative items to work on for your credit report.

Their staff is extensively knowledgeable, and if you pay for one of the higher-priced plans, you’ll get several personal-finance tools to help you tackle your debts and stay on top of how the credit repair company is performing.

All told, it’s a well-constructed and comprehensive credit repair service. They’ve got a good track record and plenty of expertise under their roof in exchange for relatively high prices.

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5. AMB Credit Consultants – Best for Married Couples

AMB Credit Consultants are another good choice if you want an agency with experience – they have 13 years of it. They’ve also got an excellent A rating with the BBB, and only six complaints as of 2020.

The company offers only two packages AMB Credit Empowerment Individual and AMB Credit Empowerment Couple packages, making it simple to apply for their service. Sometimes it can be irritating to have to pick between several services when you just want someone to help you with your negative credit report items.

The individual credit empowerment package can be purchased for a one-time fee of $149 and an additional $99 fee for every month you want to subscribe. If you want to pick up joint accounts, then you can apply for the Couple empowerment package for $198 (one time and monthly), which is pretty affordable compared to other credit repair agencies on the market. As a result, it’s affordable for married couples or any joint account; you don’t have to be legally intertwined to take advantage.

The service provides unlimited and advanced disputes for all the major credit bureaus, plus a secured account management portal so you can track your credit repair service progress. Credit educational materials, cease-and-desist letters and templates, and inquiry disputes are all included with this comprehensive package.

We also like that they offer a moneyback guarantee up to six months if they can’t find or fix any items after that time frame. You’ll also be able to cancel without any penalty within three days of signing on to the package. All in all, it’s a great credit repair company for just about everybody, but an especially good choice for couples or joint account holders due to its affordable prices.

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6. The Credit People – Best Price

Need a credit repair agency but can’t afford to shell out lots of cash? The Credit People might be the perfect choice. They’re a bit newer than other agencies on the market, but they have a lot to like.

For starters, you can try out their package for $19 over seven days. This is a pretty reasonable fee for what essentially amounts to a trial period. The only downside, of course, is that credit improvements are unlikely within this timeframe for any credit repair company.

However, if you decide to stick with them, you can opt to pay a one-time flat rate of $420 to get everything they offer indefinitely. You read that right.

You’ll never need to pay another dime for their credit repair services. You can also choose a month by month payment plan of $79 a month, which is pretty affordable and at the lower rate for average charges in this industry.

You’ll also get a moneyback guarantee – this comes in the plate if you don’t see any positive results within 60 days, which is a generous period compared to other moneyback guarantees.

There are a few downsides to all this affordability. They only provide customer care during central time zone business hours, and they also don’t offer additional features like identity theft protection that more established companies can boast.

Still, they provide solid credit repair services for all the major credit bureaus and can help you find and repair negative items on your credit report for affordable prices. They might be a great choice for you if your budget is tight, but you need to start fixing things soon.

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7. The Credit Pros – Best for Hands-On Credit Repair

Those looking for a credit repair company that they can work with more as a partner will appreciate The Credit Pros. This agency gives you a one-to-one relationship with a certified FICO professional who acts like your personal credit repair expert. They’ll work with you to create a plan to repair your credit over time and they can be an invaluable resource for pointing out where you can avoid going wrong in the future.

But you’ll also get budgeting tools, prescription discounts, store lines of credit, payment reminders, and plenty of other bonus goodies to make them worth your while.

They also have lots of innovative benefits like identity theft restoration, cease-and-desist letter templates, and will even go above and beyond by writing goodwill letters to various creditors. They’re extremely easy to sign up with, requiring only about 90 seconds to register. Once in the site, you’ll benefit from a detailed blog that has plenty of credit education resources to help you maintain good credit over the long haul.

Your client portal provides you with live updates on your credit scores and any progress that your FICO expert is making at the moment. They offer several comprehensive packages that range between $69 a month all the way up to $149 a month. But they also have a basic credit monitoring package for $19 a month if you just want to keep an eye on your credit score and don’t need extra assistance. 

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A Buying Guide to the Best Credit Repair Companies

How do you know whether a credit repair company is legitimate? What purpose do these companies actually serve? Let’s dive into credit repair companies in more detail.

How Do Credit Repair Companies Work?

In a nutshell, credit report companies work for you by getting negative items from your credit report taken off in exchange for fees. Negative items are any incidents on your credit report that lower your overall credit score.

In this way, credit repair companies don’t deliberately add more points to your credit score. They just remove negative influences so your whole score goes up.

What Do Credit Repair Companies Actually Do?

Credit repair companies do this by ordering credit reports and reviewing them for various errors or negative items they think they can contest. In lots of cases, minor negative events on your credit report can be contested with the credit bureaus and they’ll remove them just to avoid the hassle of a fight. In other incidences, there really are negative items on your credit reports that were improperly placed and can be removed after a review.

Some of the negative items credit repair companies can get removed include:

• charge-offs
• bankruptcies
• late payments
• tax liens
• and more

Credit repair companies will send direct communications to various creditors to contest these charges or get the items removed. This may involve sending letters to dispute the information, sending cease-and-desist letters to debt collectors personally, and requesting validation for certain items on your credit report.

They’ll also normally begin their services to you by asking for your personal information, especially so they can compare it against items on your credit report.

What credit repair companies can’t do is arguably just as extensive. Knowing what they can and can’t do is one way you can spot a credit repair scam before you fall for their tricks. Credit repair companies cannot:

• replace your credit file with a new one
• charge fees if you cancel
• charge upfront fees before they perform a service
• promise specific results, especially within a certain timeframe
• force credit bureaus to get rid of negative items – they can only ask or point out incorrect information
• advise you to make false statements, like claiming that an accurate negative item on your credit report is inaccurate for the purposes of boosting your score

Furthermore, credit repair companies can’t do anything you can’t do by yourself. Their value comes from other factors, not from unique skills that only they possess.

Why Use Credit Repair Companies?

Credit repair companies can be worthwhile in the long run because, even though they don’t do anything you can’t handle yourself, they provide expertise and more man-hours to work on your credit score. Think of it as hiring specialists to help you improve your credit score over time instead of a fix-all approach.

Credit repair companies are staffed by financial or crediting experts. They spent every day negotiating with various creditors and credit bureaus, so they know exactly who to contact and what channels to use if you want to dispute an item on your credit report. They also know exactly what to look for.

For instance, you might be boggled at the number of items on your credit report. A credit repair agency can scan that list and find areas where there might be incorrect information or places where you can quickly improve.

Another good analogy is to liken them to a tax specialist. You can file your taxes yourself. But tax specialists have college degrees qualifying them to look at tax forms and find you tax breaks that you would otherwise miss.

So many people use tax specialists to net a greater return at the end of the year. You should look at using a credit repair agency the same way.

In fact, one in ten Americans don’t have a credit history at all. This can have the same repercussions as a poor credit score, which frequently requires the assistance of a leading credit repair company.

Are Some Credit Repair Companies Illegitimate?

Yes. Some credit repair agencies are actually scams or may not be legitimate business entities. There are some ways in which you can spot these scams, however, including:

• if the agency doesn’t inform you of your rights – specifically, they should provide you with a written disclosure called “Consumer Credit File Rights Under State and Federal Law”
• if they don’t put your agreement in writing. Never trust any financial organization that relies on word-of-mouth for their agreements
• if they demand payment before doing any work – this is explicitly illegal
• if they can remove any legitimate or accurate information from your credit report
• if they swear or “guarantee” that they can increase your credit score by a set amount. No credit repair company can provide guaranteed results; they just increase the odds of you improving your credit score over time and can possibly provide some benefits

Aside from all these bad signs, you can also check out the customer reputation or history of a credit repair company through resources like the Better Business Bureau or our guide. See what other people have to say before forking over some cash.

All in All, is Credit Repair Worth the Money?

Overall, credit repair companies can be worth your time and money. But you shouldn’t expect them to magically repair your credit score alone. In fact, we’d recommend working on your credit score through DIY measures in conjunction with the services a credit repair agency can provide.

This will put extra pressure on your credit score and help you maximize the improvement you can make in a short period of time. Credit repair companies can also sometimes save you time that you might otherwise have to spend investigating your own credit report or negotiating with creditors and credit bureaus yourself.

However, if you’re strapped for cash, there’s no reason why you can’t improve your credit score by yourself. Again, everything credit repair agencies do, you can do yourself, and almost always for free. Consider your budget and any debts you might need to pay off before paying for a credit repair company.

What Other Measures Improve Credit?

There are lots of ways you can “DIY” your credit repair efforts and find debt relief.

The most obvious of these is paying off your debts and making payments to your credit cards and other debt obligations on time. This will slowly but surely drag your credit score back up into the positive numbers. However, this takes a lot of time and you may need to eliminate negative items before you can see real growth.

To that end, it could be helpful to look into credit repair software. These software solutions can cost several hundred dollars, but they let you look into your own credit reports and provide you with several of the same tools, letter templates, and lists of things to look out for that credit repair companies already use in a professional context.

It’s essentially an automated assistant to help you do the credit repair company’s job, but on your own time. You still have to negotiate with the creditors yourself, of course.

You can also look into credit counseling, which may even be free if you find someone to help you from a nonprofit organization. You have to be careful about scams just like with credit repair agencies, though.

Credit counselors are essentially financial specialists that can review your free credit reports and help you figure out a credit repair plan. They don’t negotiate with creditors for you but give you insight into your problems and possible DIY solutions.

When it comes to managing your debts, you can consolidate lots of your high-interest debt into a low-interest loan through debt consolidation. Our guide on debt consolidation can tell you more; it’s a great way to increase your credit score and make lots of debt significantly easier to manage.

Debt settlements are an option, too. Settlements relieve you of existing debt by deleting charges like late fees and the like. But be careful when using these, as they may show up as charge-offs or otherwise hurt your credit score in the long run.

Does Paying Off Collections Improve Credit?

Debt collection accounts are credit report entries that show that you defaulted on a previous debt or loan. Your creditor eventually sold the loan to a collection agency or a debt buyer, who is now more than likely trying to collect your debt with frustrating persistence.

Naturally, collections debts and their associated accounts are extremely bad for your credit score. However, paying off collections doesn’t directly increase your credit score; it just stops more negative items from accruing over time.

How Can You Raise Your Credit Score By 100 or 200 Points?

Remember that building credit takes a lot of time. Credit bureaus usually only collect the payment information that they use to build their scores once a month. This means that your score will only update once a month, and not by very much.

Raising your score by 100 or 200 points (or even more) is likely to take you several months, even with more aggressive credit repair efforts. However, the best ways to raise your credit score significantly include:

• paying all recurring payments on time
• paying off debts procedurally and aggressively
• not taking on additional debt
• not opening new credit cards
• closing credit cards or credit accounts you don’t use
• eliminating negative items on your credit report

Doing all these things, with or without the help of a credit repair company, will go a long way toward progressively raising your credit score over a couple of months.

How Long Do Closed Accounts Remain on Your Credit Report?

It depends on whether the account was in good or bad standing with the credit bureau in question. Most credit bureaus remove any closed accounts after 10 years if the accounts were in good standing. They remove accounts that were in bad standing (i.e. with a history of late payments) 7 years from the date of the account’s closure. All this is to say that your closed accounts can still affect your credit score positively or negatively for a long time, so treat every account you open carefully.

What Credit Score is Acceptable for Buying a House?

Technically, you can buy a house with any credit score. Your credit score just affects the types of loans you might be approved for. Lower scores usually lead to lenders giving you loans with high-interest rates and extra fees. The reverse is true if you have high credit.

In most cases, those with credit scores of 700 or above will enjoy excellent loan options. If you have a credit score in the 600s, you’ll likely have to deal with subpar loans. Anything below 600 and you may not be approved for a home loan at all – beware of scammers or bad mortgage deals if someone claims otherwise.

But even if your score is below 600, you still have options. There are specific ways you can increase your credit score for home buying—specific tips and tricks for those with less than perfect credit, who are willing to put in the work.

Is It Better to Use a Credit Repair Company or DIY Methods?

Ultimately, neither option is specifically better than the other. Credit repair companies have significant advantages that include:

• the expertise of individuals who know what they’re doing
• relieving you of the time and effort needed to fight for a better credit score
• the advice of professionals who can tell you what to work on first
• and so on

However, your credit score is your own responsibility and you shouldn’t shy away from taking some DIY steps to build your credit back up to a high score. We’d recommend using a credit repair company to some extent if you can afford it while also working proactively on your own credit repair efforts.

Summary

All in all, credit repair companies can be valuable tools in your kit when you need to repair your credit and overcome your debts. If you have bad credit and don’t attempt to responsibly fix it, further problems could arise.

If you need to borrow, for example, you could be stuck with a bad credit loan. While there are some bad credit loans with guaranteed approval, their interest rates are far from ideal.

At the same time, credit repair companies aren’t magical miracle workers. Keep your expectations in check, look for and use credit repair companies wisely, and be prepared to do some legwork yourself. You’ll be well on your way to repairing your credit score.