A credit score is a number meant to summarise, at a glance, how risky you look to a lender based on your borrowing and repayment history. A credit report is the underlying detail behind that number — every account you've had, whether payments were on time, how much you owe, and how many times lenders have checked on you recently.
There is no single official South African scale
Unlike some countries with one dominant scoring model, South Africa has four registered credit bureaus — TransUnion, Experian, Compuscan, and XDS — and each runs its own scoring model with its own range and its own bands. A score from one bureau isn't directly comparable to a score from another, and there's no single number that counts as "the" South African credit score. Be wary of any source that presents a single band table (like a flat 0–999 scale) as a universal SA standard — it's describing one bureau's model, not a national one.
What matters more than memorising a specific scale is understanding the factors that move a score in any of these models, because those factors are broadly consistent across all four bureaus.
What actually moves your score
- Payment history — whether you've paid accounts on time, consistently, over time. This tends to carry the most weight of any single factor.
- How much of your available credit you're using — using a large portion of your credit limits, even if you pay it off monthly, can weigh on your score more than using a smaller portion.
- How long you've held credit accounts — a longer track record generally helps, which is part of why closing your oldest account isn't always a good idea even if you don't use it.
- How many new credit applications you've made recently — each hard enquiry (a lender checking your file to decide whether to lend to you) can have a small negative effect, and several in a short period looks riskier than one.
- The mix and number of accounts you hold — a reasonable variety, managed responsibly, tends to help more than a single account type.
You're entitled to check your own report for free
Under the National Credit Act, every consumer is entitled to one free credit report from each registered bureau per year. Checking your own report doesn't affect your score, and it's the only reliable way to catch errors — an account that isn't yours, an outdated default that should have been removed, or a payment marked late that wasn't.
The next lesson moves from your individual credit position to a legal one: what "over-indebtedness" actually means under the National Credit Act, and who gets to decide it.