For Three Weeks in 2022, Equifax Handed Lenders the Wrong Score. Go Find Your Paperwork.

If you applied for anything that pulls credit between March 17 and April 8, 2022, a car loan, a credit card, a mortgage, an apartment, the score Equifax sent that lender may have been wrong.

Equifax has agreed to pay $100 million over it. The attorneys on the case call it the largest Fair Credit Reporting Act settlement ever reached.

You can’t file a claim yet. There’s still something to do this week.

For three weeks in the spring of 2022, a coding problem inside Equifax’s systems produced inaccurate scores and shipped them to lenders anyway. About 4 million people were caught in the window. Roughly 300,000 of them had a score that differed from the corrected version by at least 25 points, which is more than enough to flip an approval into a denial or move you into a worse pricing tier.

The lead plaintiff, a Florida consumer named Nydia Jenkins, sued in August 2022. Her score fell 130 points, and she says it cost her on an auto loan.

Equifax fixed the reports afterward. It has not admitted wrongdoing and still denies violating federal law.

Here’s the part that decides whether this matters to you.

A corrected credit file does nothing about the loan you already signed. Say a bad score in April 2022 moved you up a pricing tier on a used car. You have been paying that gap every month since, and Equifax updating a database in May did not send you a refund. That was the core of the complaint: the harm couldn’t simply be erased by correcting the reports after the fact.

Estimated payouts land somewhere around $95 to $280. Not life-changing. Real money for a database error that ran three weeks.

So do the boring thing now, while there’s no deadline pressure.

Dig out anything from spring 2022 where credit was pulled. Loan documents, a lease application, a denial letter. If you were turned down, the lender was required to send you an adverse action notice, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is clear about what has to be in it: the specific reasons your application was rejected, the credit score used, and “the name, address, and telephone number of the credit reporting company that provided the report.” A notice with Equifax’s name on it, dated inside that window, is the whole case in one page.

Then wait, and ignore anyone who contacts you first. Judge Leigh Martin May in the Northern District of Georgia hasn’t granted preliminary approval yet. Nothing to sign up for means nothing to pay for, and anyone calling to “secure your Equifax payout” for a fee is running a different business entirely.

If approval comes, the clock is short: notice 42 days out, then 90 days to file. The final fairness hearing is set for January 22, 2027.

One more piece of housekeeping. This is not the Equifax settlement whose claims close September 1. That one is a $2.2 million case about duplicate collection accounts covering roughly 37,000 people who got a letter in 2022. If you were mailed that notice, file for it separately, because the deadline is real and it’s next week.

Check your own file while you’re at it. The credit score tool walks through what actually moves the number, and our credit cards hub covers what a 25-point swing does to the offers you see.

File this away. Then go find the paperwork, because in three months everyone else will be looking for theirs at once.

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