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Why does one credit report look clean and the other one shows my hardship?
Bayley Clarke · Mortgage broker on the road · Last checked 11 November 2026 · 3 min read
The short answer
It depends which credit reporting agency the report came from. There's more than one bureau in Australia, mainly Equifax, illion and Experian, and they don't all hold the same information or work out your score the same way.
Most banks lean on Equifax, so for most people that's the report closest to how a lender will see you. But some lenders check illion or Experian instead, so the safest move is to look at all of them and cut through the noise before you apply.
The 60 second version, filmed from the driver's seat. The rest of this page is the detail underneath it.
Why the reports don't match
Each bureau is its own business with its own database. A lender or a phone company might report your accounts and repayment history to one bureau, two, or all three. So a hardship arrangement reported to one bureau can show up there and be missing completely from another.
On top of that, each bureau has its own scoring model. Even with the same information, the numbers come out differently. That's why one free app can show you a great score while another shows something very different. Neither is wrong, they're just measuring off different data with a different ruler.
Which one the bank looks at
Most of the big lenders pull from Equifax, which is why I treat it as the source of truth for how most banks will see your credit. But it isn't universal. Some lenders use illion or Experian, and a few check more than one.
So a clean report from the free consumer app you happened to download doesn't mean the bank sees a clean file. If the hardship sits on the bureau your lender checks, it'll see it. Getting the right report in front of you before we pick a lender means no surprises halfway through an application.
What a hardship listing actually means
If you've had a financial hardship arrangement with a lender, such as a paused or reduced repayment, that can be recorded on your credit report. Under the credit reporting rules it isn't allowed to be used in working out your credit score, and it can only stay on the report for 12 months before it has to be deleted.
But a lender reading the full report can still see it while it's there, and some will ask about it. It's not the end of the world. It just needs explaining properly in the application, and some lenders are more relaxed about recent hardship than others.
The honest bit: don't trust one free score
You're entitled to a free copy of your credit report from each bureau every three months. Use it. Pull the lot, read the actual listings, not just the score, and see where the hardship shows.
If something is wrong, you can ask the bureau or the lender to fix it. If it's right, we work with it and pick a lender that will look at the whole picture.
Want help reading your credit reports side by side?
A 30 minute call. We go through what each report shows, which one your likely lender reads, and how to handle the hardship listing.
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Next question
I had a hardship arrangement a couple of years ago. Will that stop me refinancing?Generally not. Banks differ on how long you need to be out of hardship, from three months to a couple of years.
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