Believe it or not, this is a question we don’t get asked very much – and you’d think we would! It’s a very important measure of data quality. If I move to a new house today, how long will it take for that new address to appear on USInfoSearch? What sorts of changes might cause that new address to appear on USInfoSearch?

The short answer? Around 2 weeks. The long answer? That all depends…

Moving homes and getting a new address on your credit history

Recently, one of our employees, Jason, was moving to a new apartment in order to be located a bit closer to our office. He previously had all his mail and bills sent to his parents’ house or his PO Box.

His drivers license was out of date and utilities were taken care of by his landlord, so there wasn’t much to tie Jason to his current address at all. No paper trail at all! So it’s no wonder that his address never appeared in our data.

Fast forward to this March and Jason decided it was time for an upgrade. He applied for a new apartment nearer to our office. On the application, it asked what his current address was. He filled it in honestly. They ran an FCRA Compliant background check and credit check to verify the information Jason had provided. Less than two weeks later, to his astonishment, his current address was now showing up in our data. So what caused this change?

In Jason’s case, it was a hard-pull on his credit history. All the submitted information matched (Name, DOB, SSN, previous addresses) except for the current address the bureau had on file. It’s reasonable to assume that they added this data in to his file based upon this hard pull.

What else can cause these sorts of changes?

• Taking out any sort of line of credit (auto loan/lease, mortgage, personal loan, credit card, etc)
• Filing for Change of Address (COA) with the post office
• Changing the address on an existing line of credit
• Anything that would cause a hard-pull on your credit history
• Actively informing the bureaus of your address change

In short, it typically takes about 2 weeks for a change in someone’s address history to be reflected in our service as long as their credit data is involved. Other actions, like Change of Address filings, can take a bit longer. Hopefully this little experiment of ours will shed some light on our data’s latency and recency.