Reacting to MoneySavingExpert’s report of 27 August 2026, “TransUnion to change millions of people’s credit scores – but it’s what’s on your credit FILE that matters most”, and to TransUnion UK’s own announcement of 26 August 2026 launching its next-generation consumer credit score. Every borrowing rate below is the Bank of England’s published average, and every statement about your legal rights is read straight from the Information Commissioner’s Office guidance, with the arithmetic shown so you can check it.
Our view, before the detail
A credit score is a marketing number. We do not mean that unkindly — it is genuinely useful as a rough progress indicator, and TransUnion’s redesign looks like a real improvement on the thing it replaces. But it has always been an agency’s summary of you, shown to you, on a scale the agency invented. The proof arrived last week: TransUnion can change everybody’s number without changing a single fact about anybody. Same person, same borrowing, same payment history, different digits.
So the useful reaction to this announcement is not to check your score. It is to go and read the thing the score was summarising, which most people have never done, and which costs nothing. That is the whole point MoneySavingExpert made, and it is worth restating in money terms rather than principle: over three years, the gap between a file lenders like and a file they don’t is comfortably more than two thousand pounds on an ordinary household’s ordinary debts. The number above it is worth nothing at all.
What TransUnion has actually announced
TransUnion is one of the credit reference agencies that compile the record British lenders check. On 26 August it announced a new consumer score with a wider range, 0–999 instead of 0–710, reaching its credit monitoring partners on a phased rollout from late September 2026 to June 2027. MoneySavingExpert has said its own Credit Club will not show updated figures until at least late October 2026.
The bands are renamed and renumbered. “Poor” becomes Low and “Very poor” becomes Very low — language TransUnion considers less loaded. The new bands run: Very low 0–487, Low 488–562, Fair 563–652, Good 653–785, Excellent 786–999. The score itself is a different calculation too, built on trended data — how account balances have moved over time and how credit cards are used — rather than the single snapshot behind the old one. TransUnion’s James Robinson, Managing Director of Consumer Interactive, framed it as a response to “significant confusion among consumers about what credit scores mean”.
Then the sentence that matters most, from TransUnion’s own release: “The information shared with organisations about an individual’s credit history will remain unchanged.” Read that twice. The record lenders read is untouched. Only the number you are shown is moving.
Per MoneySavingExpert’s reporting, most people land in the same band — 58% stay put, 36% move up a band and 6% move down. If you are in that last group, nothing about your borrowing got worse last week.
Why comparing your old number to your new one is meaningless
Here is the trap, and it is pure arithmetic. Suppose your TransUnion score today is 610. On a scale that stops at 710, that sits 86% of the way up, comfortably inside the old “Good” band of 604–627. Now imagine a number in the low 600s appearing on a scale that runs to 999. The same digits read as roughly 61% of the way up, and the eye tells you something collapsed.
Nothing collapsed. The new score is not the old score rescaled — it is a different calculation on a different range, so old and new are not two readings of one thing, they are two different things. Comparing them is like comparing your weight in kilos to your weight in pounds and concluding you have gained. If your number moves this autumn and your spending, borrowing and payment history did not, ignore the movement entirely.
What the file is worth, in pounds
This is where the file earns its keep, because the price of credit is set from the file, not the score. The Bank of England publishes what households are actually paying. In its Money and Credit release for June 2026, the effective rate on interest-charging credit cards was 21.49%, on interest-charging overdrafts 21.17%, and on new personal loans to individuals 9.67%. Bank Rate, for context, has been 3.75% since 18 December 2025.
Illustrative household, using the Bank of England’s June 2026 average rates. Not a recommendation to borrow, consolidate or move anything.
A household carrying £3,400 on a credit card and sitting £1,200 into an overdraft — £4,600 of ordinary, unremarkable debt.
- Card: £3,400 at 21.49% = £730.66 a year.
- Overdraft: £1,200 at 21.17% = £254.04 a year.
- Total interest: £984.70 a year — £82.06 a month, and the £4,600 is no smaller at the end of it.
Now the same £4,600 borrowed at the average new personal loan rate of 9.67% over three years. The monthly payment works out at £146.85, total repaid £5,286.57, so the interest is £686.57 — and the debt is gone after 36 months.
Three years of the first version costs £2,954.10 in interest and still leaves £4,600 outstanding. Three years of the second costs £686.57 and leaves nothing outstanding. The gap in interest alone is £2,267.53.
Access to the cheaper tier is decided on what is written on your file — the payment history, the defaults, the addresses, the errors. It is not decided by whether your number is printed out of 710 or out of 999.
That is the whole argument in one box. £2,267 over three years, and a debt that actually ends, is what an accurate, well-maintained file buys. And it is worth saying plainly: those Bank of England figures are averages, so plenty of households are paying more than 21.49% on a card. If that is you, the file is worth checking today rather than at the weekend.
What is actually on the file — and the four things to look at
According to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the three main consumer credit reference agencies in the UK are Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, and they are licensed by the Financial Conduct Authority. Their files hold how you have handled credit and utility accounts, your previous addresses, and public information including the electoral roll, county court judgments, and bankruptcy and insolvency data. Our full guide, your credit report, not your credit score, walks through what each section means, what stays on the file and for how long.
When you open yours, four things are worth more than the rest:
- Accounts you do not recognise. The clearest early sign of identity fraud, and the reason to check all three agencies rather than one.
- Your addresses. The ICO advises listing every address you have lived at in the last six years when you request your file — and a stale or mistyped address is one of the most common quiet causes of a declined application.
- Your electoral roll entry. It is on the file, it is easy to fix, and if you have moved recently it is very often wrong. Registering to vote on GOV.UK takes about five minutes.
- Financial associations. A joint account or old joint mortgage links someone else’s record to yours, and the link outlives the relationship until you ask for it to be broken.
Two things to do this week
One: order your statutory report from all three agencies. It is free. The ICO is unambiguous — you have the right to request the information held about your financial standing, “making this request is free of charge”, and there is “no obligation on anyone” to sign up to a monthly monitoring subscription to get it. Look for the phrase statutory report: Experian, Equifax, TransUnion. Do all three, because lenders choose which agencies they report to and an account can appear on one file and be absent from another. Each agency has one month from receiving your request to respond, and may ask for proof of name and address first.
Two: if something is wrong, chase the lender, not just the agency. This is the bit almost everybody gets the wrong way round. The ICO’s position is that if an entry carries a company’s name, that company is generally responsible for it, and the agency “cannot amend this data without the permission of that company” — while lenders can push a correction through directly. So write to both, and start with whoever put the entry there. Where the entry is disputed rather than plainly wrong, you can ask for a Notice of Correction: your own short statement attached to that entry, which anyone searching your file will see and should take into account.
What is still uncertain
Three honest unknowns. First, when your app switches — the rollout runs from late September 2026 to June 2027 and TransUnion has not published a partner-by-partner schedule, so your number may change this month or next summer. Second, whether any lender adopts the new score in its own decisions. TransUnion has confirmed the underlying data shared with organisations is unchanged, but lenders build their own scorecards on that data and none has said publicly what it will do with the new number. Third, whether Experian and Equifax follow. Neither has announced a comparable change, so the well-worn confusion of three agencies with three different scales is not going anywhere this year.
None of those three change what is worth doing this week, which is rather the point. The score is the weather report. The file is the weather.
Where coaching ends. Reading your credit file, fixing errors on it and understanding what drives the cost of borrowing is coaching territory, and it is all here. Choosing or arranging a specific credit product is not something we do — Buzz Money Coach is a trading style of Buzz Money Ltd, which is not authorised by the FCA to give regulated financial advice and does not give it. And if the real problem is that the debt itself has become unmanageable, please do not start with us. StepChange, National Debtline and MoneyHelper give free, independent, properly regulated debt help today, and they are better at it than anyone selling you anything.
If the worked example above described your kitchen table more closely than you would like, the honest next step is not a score-boosting app. It is a clear picture of where the money goes: start with our budgeting basics guide, then see what an order of attack looks like in how to clear debt without wrecking everything else and put your own figures through the debt payoff calculator. And if a mortgage is the reason you are watching the number at all, the first-time buyer guide explains what lenders weigh alongside it.