Equifax, Experian and illion: which credit score do lenders use?

For a long time Australia had three consumer credit reporting bodies that ordinary people actually had to think about: Equifax, Experian and illion. Marketing pages treated them as interchangeable “credit scores”. They were not. Each held its own file. Each sold access to lenders. Each calculated a number on a scale it chose.

The landscape has since narrowed. Experian acquired illion’s consumer credit-reporting business (the ACCC did not oppose the deal in 2024), and from 1 April 2026 the two consumer files have been operated as a single Experian credit reporting body. That does not mean Australia now has one score. It means the second file got bigger, Equifax is still the other file, and lenders still usually pick one.

Plenty Credit’s old co-operative site in Lalor never pretended a member’s “rating” lived in a single drawer. Branch staff dealt with banks, utilities and the occasional surprise default that had been listed somewhere the member had never looked. The useful habit is the same: know who holds the file your lender will actually open.

This is general information, not a recommendation to apply for credit with any particular provider.

Which credit bureau do Australian lenders use?

There is no statutory list that says Westpac must use Equifax or that a car-yard financier must use Experian. A credit provider chooses a reporting body — sometimes more than one — under a commercial contract. The ACCC’s public comments on the Experian–illion transaction are the clearest official description of the market: it is concentrated, Equifax has been the largest consumer bureau, and the majority of credit providers use a single bureau, most often Equifax, even when they hold contracts with more than one.

That last point is the one score apps bury. You can have a polished Experian number and still be assessed on Equifax, or the reverse. The lender is not required to reconcile both files for you.

Do the major banks all use Equifax?

In practice you will meet three patterns:

• Primary Equifax. Common among larger consumer lenders. The assessor’s screen is an Equifax file plus the lender’s own data.
• Primary Experian (now including former illion consumer data). More common among some specialist lenders, certain non-bank products, and businesses that historically sat on illion.
• Primary plus a peek. A lender contracts with two bodies but still treats one as the decision file and the other as a back-up match.

If you are declined, it is reasonable to ask which reporting body was used. You then pull that report — you are entitled to a free copy after a refusal — and you still pull the other one, because the next lender may not use the same drawer. ASIC MoneySmart lists Experian and Equifax as the two main bodies to request from, with the reminder that they can hold different information.

What happened to illion’s consumer credit file?

illion (and before that, Dun & Bradstreet in Australian consumer folklore) was the third name on every “check all three” checklist. Utilities, some smaller credit providers, and a long tail of enquiries lived there. People who only ever ordered Equifax would discover an overdue phone account or an old personal-loan enquiry sitting on illion as if it had arrived from another country.

Experian Australia Credit Services moved to acquire Credit Data Solutions Pty Ltd (illion). The ACCC completed its informal review in August 2024 and did not oppose the acquisition. Industry and consumer explainers, including CreditSmart’s note on the change, describe the operational result: from 1 April 2026 illion and Experian operate as a single Experian consumer credit reporting body.

What does the combined Experian report include?

What that means in a kitchen in the Plenty Valley:

• A lender that checks “Experian” after that date is looking at a combined consumer report that is supposed to include information previously held on both the old illion and old Experian files, including Experian credit enquiries.
• Letters and systems take time to catch up. If a decline letter still says “illion”, it will often be pointing at the new Experian report. Order Experian.
• Your score on that combined file can move even if you have done nothing new, because the model is seeing a wider set of accounts and enquiries. A move is not automatically an error. It can simply be a fuller photograph.

Experian’s own access page now tells consumers they receive one report that includes the information previously held by illion and Experian. The free-access rules have not been repealed: you can still request a free report at least every three months, and in the extra circumstances the Privacy Act allows (including after a credit refusal or a correction). Details sit with the OAIC’s access guidance as well as with Experian.

You do not stop checking Equifax because illion changed hands. You stop paying a third party to fetch a separate illion PDF that no longer exists as a live consumer bureau.

Why Equifax and Experian files still disagree

Even with two bodies instead of three, mismatch is normal. Reasons that show up in real reports:

Not every credit provider reports to every body. A store card, a BNPL account, a mutual, or a utility may furnish data to one bureau. Comprehensive credit reporting improved coverage, but it did not create a single national ledger.

Enquiries are logged where the lender looked. If you applied for a card and the issuer pulled Equifax, that enquiry lives on Equifax. Experian may show nothing. Clustered applications therefore look different depending on which door each lender opened. See hard versus soft credit enquiries.

Identity matching is imperfect. Former names, hyphenated surnames, an old Lalor address versus a new one in South Morang, a date-of-birth typo — mixed files happen. So do split files, where your history is divided across two records. That is a correction problem, not a “score boost” problem. How to dispute errors on your credit report is the process.

Scores are different products. Equifax has long used a 0–1,200 consumer scale with its own bands. Experian historically used 0–1,000 and has published a 0–1,200 range on the combined file. Our explainer on what is a good credit score in Australia is about those labels. This article is about which drawer the label came from.

Closed and aged items drop off on their own clocks. An account that has aged off one file can still be visible on the other if the reporting or the retention timing differed. Do not assume a blank section on Experian means Equifax is blank too.

Why you must check more than one file

The sentence that belongs on a fridge magnet: lenders pick a file; you cannot pick it for them after you click apply.

Checking only the app that came pre-installed on a phone is how people walk into a car loan with a “very good” badge and a default the dealer’s financier can see. Checking only Equifax is how an illion-era telco default used to ambush someone who had been exemplary with a bank card. Checking only Experian now is how you miss an Equifax-only personal-loan enquiry from last spring.

A practical sequence, none of which requires a subscription:

1. Order the free Equifax report.
2. Order the free Experian report (the combined consumer file).
3. Save both PDFs with the date in the filename.
4. Make a two-column list: accounts, enquiries, defaults, addresses. Anything that appears on one side only gets a highlight, not a panic.
5. If something is wrong, correct it through the provider and the body. Corrections are free. If you are not satisfied, AFCA handles many credit-reporting complaints about members, and the OAIC is the privacy regulator.

Repeat at least when you are about to apply for something large, and after any refusal. Repeating every three months is the legal rhythm, not a sales upsell. How to get a free credit report walks through the identity steps and the trial-subscription traps.

Paid monitoring can alert you when a new enquiry appears. It still watches the bureau it is plugged into. A single-bureau alert is not a complete watch.

How should you read a decline that names a bureau?

Decline letters are often vague (“we were unable to approve your application”) because lenders dislike writing novels. When they do name a bureau, use it:

• Pull that report immediately. You have a separate free-access ground after a refusal.
• Look for the specific item a reasonable assessor would flinch at: a recent unsecured enquiry cluster, a default, a repayment history of late ticks, a limit that is already large.
• If the named bureau’s file looks ordinary, the “no” may still be serviceability or policy — income, existing debts, product rules — rather than the bureau score. A score app cannot see the lender’s policy.
• If the file contains someone else’s address or an account you never opened, treat it as a mixed file or as identity theft, not as a personal failing.

Do not respond to a decline by firing applications at every lender on a comparison table. Each extra hard look can add another enquiry to whichever bureau that lender uses, which is how one bruised application becomes a pattern. If cash flow is the real problem, financial hardship is the conversation, not a second-chance card.

What about commercial files, “illion” brands and old PDFs?

Consumer credit reporting is what this journal means by Equifax and Experian scores. Businesses can have commercial files as well. A sole trader who once directed a company may see director information on a consumer report; that is not the same as a full commercial bureau extract. Do not mix the two when you are trying to understand a personal credit-card decision.

illion as a brand has not vanished from every product in the Australian data industry. Marketing scores, identity tools and business services can still wear old names. For a household trying to understand a consumer lending decision after April 2026, the two reports that matter are Equifax and the current Experian consumer report.

Keep old PDFs. They are evidence if a listing date is later disputed. They are not the live file a lender will pull tomorrow.

A Plenty Valley way of putting it

The former co-operative’s disclosure pages were unfashionable on purpose. Members were expected to read more than one document before they signed. Credit reporting deserves the same stubbornness. Australia did not move from three scores to one truth. It moved from three consumer drawers to two, with a lot of history packed into the Experian drawer, and with Equifax still sitting on the other side of the office.

If you want a single public checklist rather than a magazine essay, use MoneySmart’s credit-report page, Equifax’s and Experian’s own access forms, and the OAIC’s correction rights. Then ignore anyone who says they can merge your files into a guaranteed approval. Lenders will keep picking a file. Your job is to have read both.