Your credit score decides whether you get a home loan, what interest rate you pay on a car, and sometimes whether you get the rental at all. Yet most South Africans have never seen theirs. Here is how the score works and, more importantly, how to move it.
How credit scores work in South Africa
Four main bureaus — TransUnion, Experian, Compuscore and XDS — score you, usually on a scale from around 300 to 850+. Lenders read that number as a single question: how likely is this person to pay me back? The score is built from your actual credit behaviour, which is good news — behaviour is something you control.
Get your free credit report first
You are legally entitled to one free credit report per year from each bureau. Pull it before doing anything else. Roughly one in five reports contains an error — a paid account still showing as owing, an account that is not yours, a duplicate listing — and disputing those errors is often the fastest points you will ever gain.
What actually moves your score
- Pay every account on time, every time. Payment history is the single biggest factor. One missed payment can cost you more points than months of good behaviour earned. Automate minimums so a forgetful week never becomes a black mark.
- Lower your utilisation. Using more than about 30% of your available credit signals stress. A credit card with a R10,000 limit should ideally carry under R3,000. Paying it down before the statement date, not after, is a quiet cheat code.
- Keep old accounts open. Length of credit history helps. Closing your oldest card can lower your score. If a store account has no fees, sometimes leaving it open at zero balance beats closing it.
- Apply for credit sparingly. Every application leaves an enquiry. Ten applications in a month reads as desperation to a lender's model.
What does NOT help
- Checking your own score does not hurt it — that myth stops people from ever looking.
- You cannot pay a "credit repair" company to legally erase accurate negative information. If they promise that, they are selling a scam.
The timeline
Fixing report errors can lift a score in weeks. Rebuilding from missed payments and high balances takes months of consistent behaviour — usually six to twelve. There is no overnight fix, but there is a reliable one.
Your credit score is a running average of your financial reliability. You cannot cram for it, but you can absolutely raise it.
Khaya watches every account balance and payment date, so the behaviours that build your score become automatic instead of hopeful.
