Check your free credit score through RBC, TD, BMO, CIBC, or Scotiabank and you’ll get the exact same bureau every single time. All five partnered with TransUnion for their built-in banking app tools, which means five of Canada’s six biggest banks are effectively showing you one half of your actual credit picture. The other half, your Equifax file, barely shows up anywhere in a bank app at all. Getting the full picture for free means knowing which service covers which bureau, not just picking whichever option is already installed on your phone.
Every legitimate free option available in Canada right now comes with its own tradeoffs worth knowing before you pick one, what it actually gives you, what it leaves out, and how to combine two of them into a genuinely complete picture of both your files.
The Legal Baseline Every Canadian Already Has
Both of Canada’s credit bureaus are required to give you your own credit report for free, and this isn’t a marketing promotion, it’s a standing right. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada confirms you can access your report online, by mail, by phone, or in person, with both Equifax and TransUnion updating their online versions monthly. Requesting your own report through any of these channels counts as a soft inquiry and has zero effect on your score, regardless of how many times you check it.
A free credit report from the bureau isn’t automatically the same thing as a free credit score, and that distinction catches a lot of people off guard. TransUnion’s basic free report doesn’t include your actual three-digit number, only the underlying account history that number gets built from, with one specific exception. Quebec residents can access their TransUnion score online for free under the province’s own consumer-reporting rules, a right that doesn’t extend to the rest of the country. Everywhere else, getting the actual score for free means going through one of the services below rather than the bureau’s bare report request.
The Two Apps That Cover Each Bureau
Borrowell and Credit Karma are the two names that come up constantly for a reason, and they’re not interchangeable. Borrowell pulls from Equifax, updates weekly, and doesn’t require a SIN, credit card, or bank account to sign up. Credit Karma Canada pulls from TransUnion instead, also with regular updates and no cost. Since your Equifax and TransUnion scores can genuinely differ by 10 to 50 points depending on which lenders report to which bureau, using only one of these two apps means you’re seeing exactly half your credit file, no matter how often you check it. Our guide to Canada’s credit bureaus covers why that gap exists in more depth.
Why Your Bank App Keeps Showing You The Same Bureau
This is the asymmetry worth understanding before you assume your bank’s built-in tool has you covered. RBC, TD, BMO, CIBC, and Scotiabank all offer a free credit score directly through online or mobile banking, and every one of them runs on TransUnion’s CreditView platform specifically. CIBC and BMO layer in extra features like a score simulator and monthly report access, but the underlying bureau is identical across all five. National Bank is the notable exception among the Big Six, not currently offering an equivalent built-in tool at all.
The practical result is that if your only free credit checking habit is opening your banking app once a month, you’ve built a genuinely useful habit that’s still only telling you the TransUnion side of the story. Pairing whichever bank app you already use with Borrowell for the Equifax side costs nothing extra and closes that gap completely.
Other Free Options Worth Knowing About
A handful of other services round out the free landscape. KOHO offers free credit score access bundled with its budgeting and prepaid spending features, though it updates less frequently than Borrowell or Credit Karma. ClearScore operates similarly to Credit Karma, providing a free TransUnion-based score alongside product recommendations. Capital One’s Credit Keeper tool is open to most Canadians regardless of whether you actually hold a Capital One card, another free TransUnion option worth knowing about if you’re not banking with one of the Big Five that already offer CreditView. Wherever your number lands, our guide to what counts as a good credit score in Canada puts it in context against the national tiers lenders actually use.
None of these third-party services charge you directly. They make their money through advertising and product recommendations shown alongside your score, context worth keeping in mind for why a “free” service exists at all, though it doesn’t change the fact that the score itself costs nothing and the check itself never hurts your file.
What Even The Free Options Leave Out
The free tier from any of these services, including the bureaus’ own basic online report, gives you your score and the bulk of your account history, but not necessarily every granular detail. Equifax’s free online report specifically excludes the full month-by-month payment profile table that can span up to 25 months of payment history, detail that’s only included in a formally requested copy of your complete report. For routine monitoring, that gap rarely matters. If you’re specifically trying to trace exactly when a late payment was reported or verify the precise history behind a dispute, requesting your full report directly through the mail or phone channels covered above is worth the extra step rather than relying on the app’s summary view.
Putting Together A Complete Free Picture
Sign up for Borrowell to cover your Equifax file and either Credit Karma or your existing bank’s CreditView tool to cover TransUnion, since running both costs nothing and takes less time than most people spend deciding which streaming service to cancel. Check both on a regular cadence rather than once and never again, since checking your own score costs you nothing and never hurts it, no matter how often you look, and compare what you find against the broader picture of Canadian credit scores if any of the terminology still feels unfamiliar. If you’re in Quebec, take advantage of your province’s specific right to a free TransUnion score online rather than defaulting to a third-party app out of habit. And if the two numbers you find differ by more than a small margin, or if either app flags something you don’t recognize, that gap is worth requesting your full credit report directly from the bureau in question to investigate properly, since a free summary score is a starting point for noticing a problem, not the tool for actually resolving one.
