The single most useful fact about Canadian credit reports for a landlord: rent payments do not appear on them.

A tenant who paid $1,900 on the first of the month for ten straight years has nothing on file showing it. Their score reflects credit cards, loans and collections. Nothing else.

Which means a 620 score often describes a thin file, a newcomer, or a young applicant, not a bad tenant. Landlords treating the number as a verdict decline good applicants and keep bad ones with inherited good credit.

Here is how to read the report properly.

The two bureaus

Equifax Canada and TransUnion Canada. Neither is "the" tenant bureau. Coverage differs because not every lender reports to both, so an applicant with a clean report at one shows a collection at the other.

Some Canadian screening products sell a dual-bureau report specifically because single-bureau reports have gaps. If the decision is close, the second bureau is worth the extra cost.

The score

Canadian scores run 300 to 900. Equifax Canada's published bands, in plain terms:

• Below 560 — Poor
• 560 to 659 — Fair
• 660 to 724 — Good
• 725 to 759 — Strong
• 760 and up — Excellent

Landlords commonly use 650 or 680 as a floor. The figure is market convention, not a legal standard and not a bureau recommendation. Treating it as a hard cut-off is where a screening process starts producing outcomes you cannot defend.

Soft and hard credit pulls

Screening providers report a November 2024 change: Equifax and TransUnion reclassified rental screening pulls as soft pulls. On this basis, the pull does not affect the applicant's score and is not visible to lenders, though the applicant sees it in their own portal. Providers report the change applied retroactively about two years.

Confirm with the bureau before you promise an applicant their score will not move. It is a useful thing to be able to say, and worth saying accurately.

What the report shows

Tradelines — every credit account, with the limit, the current balance and the payment history.

R-ratings, R1 to R9, tell you more than the score does.

• R1 — pays within 30 days of billing
• R2 to R4 — progressively later payment, 30 to 90-plus days
• R5 — chronically 120-plus days late
• R7 — paying under a consolidation or consumer proposal arrangement
• R9 — bad debt, placed for collection, or bankruptcy

I-ratings apply to instalment loans and O-ratings to open credit, on the same one-to-nine scale.

An applicant with three R1 tradelines and a 640 score is telling you something completely different from an applicant with two R7s and a 640 score. Read the ratings, not only the number.

The report also shows collections, judgments, bankruptcies and consumer proposals with dates, and credit pulls showing who else has looked at the file.

How long things stay on file

• Late payments and collections — 6 years from first delinquency
• Judgments — 6 years, longer in some provinces
• First bankruptcy — 6 years after discharge
• Second bankruptcy — 14 years after discharge
• Consumer proposal — 3 years after full repayment, or 6 years from filing, whichever comes first
• Hard credit pulls — 3 years at Equifax, 6 at TransUnion

The dates matter more than the entries. A collection from five years ago sitting beside four years of clean tradelines describes someone who recovered. A collection from four months ago describes someone currently in trouble.

What the report leaves out

Rent payments, unless the applicant's prior landlord reported them through a rent-reporting service. Utility payments in most cases. Income. Employment. Anything about how someone treated a unit.

The report is one input — reference and employment verification carry more predictive weight than the score does.

Getting the report

The bureaus do not meaningfully sell a self-serve tenant screening product to small Canadian landlords. Access runs through registered resellers holding the bureau agreements and handling consent compliance.

• SingleKey — credit, background, eviction history and income verification. A single-bureau report runs $29.99 and a dual-bureau report $44.99, pay per report with no subscription. Employment and landlord reference checks are $19.99 each. Landlord pays by default, with a tenant-pay flow available. SingleKey acquired Naborly in October 2022.
• FrontLobby and Landlord Credit Bureau — a free basic tier and a premium tier at $19.92 a month billed annually. Pay-as-you-go credit reports and background checks in the $10 to $25 range depending on tier. Applicant-pay option available, and rent reporting is also offered.
• Rentcheck Credit Bureau — a long-established Canadian tenant reporting company supplying both bureaus plus its own tenancy report. Requires a membership agreement and written applicant consent. Pricing is not published, so call for current rates.
• Certn — sells primarily to property managers through demo and API rather than self-serve, so it is a poor fit for a three-door landlord. A joint privacy investigation into its tenancy screening practices was announced by federal and BC commissioners in June 2024, with no published findings as of this writing.

Rent reporting, and why it is contested

Rent reporting services let a landlord report on-time payments, which builds a tenant's credit, and unpaid balances, which does the opposite.

Vendors present it as settled. Tenant advocacy organizations have raised concerns about tenant registries, credit impacts and the interaction with provincial consumer reporting registration rules.

Treat it as an open question rather than a decided one, and get advice before signing up, particularly for the debt-reporting side.

Your legal duties around the report

Written consent before you pull is required in every province.

• British Columbia — if you deny an applicant wholly or partly because of the report, written notice is required within 30 days. The applicant is then entitled to request the reporting agency's name and address within 60 days, and to add an explanation of up to 100 words to their file.
• Ontario — if you refuse an applicant and they ask within 60 days, you must disclose the nature and source of the information and the name and address of the consumer reporting agency. The burden sits on the applicant to ask, unlike BC. Consumer reporting agencies must register with the province, which is a good reason to use a registered service rather than an informal one.
• Alberta — an agency discloses for tenancy purposes only with express consent. Applicants have dispute rights, with a 45-day response requirement, and are entitled to add a 100-word statement kept on file up to six years. Confirm whether a notify-on-refusal duty applies before you build your process around its absence.

Never accept a credit report the applicant hands you. Pull it yourself through a registered service. Applicant-supplied bureau PDFs are among the easiest documents to forge, and forged ones are circulating.

Reading the report in context

The question is not what the score is. It is what the report explains.

• A thin file with two young tradelines and a 640 score — common for newcomers and people under 25. Verify income and references harder, and consider a guarantor if your criteria allow one applied consistently.
• A recovered file with an old collection and years of clean payment since — this is a good applicant.
• A deteriorating file with recent late payments accelerating — this is the pattern predicting arrears, and it is invisible if you read only the score.
• A strong score with no rental history — fine, but verify who they lived with and why they are moving.

The score is a starting point for questions. It was never designed to be an answer.

LuxOasisOS attaches screening reports to the applicant record alongside the application and your notes, so the decision and the reasoning stay together.