A trade line is the bureau's record of a single credit account — one credit card, one car loan, one line of credit, one mortgage — reported by the creditor that extended it. A consumer's full bureau file is simply a collection of trade lines, plus public records and inquiries layered on top, which later modules cover separately. Reading a file well starts with being able to read one trade line correctly, because everything else builds on the same fields repeated across every account.
Every trade line, from either bureau, reports substantially the same core fields even though the visual layout differs between Equifax and TransUnion reports: the creditor's name, an account identifier, the date the account was opened, the type of credit, the credit limit or original loan amount, the current balance, the required payment, and a payment history record.
The creditor name identifies who extended the credit — a bank, a retailer, a finance company. The account number is typically partially masked for privacy but still useful for confirming a trade line matches a specific statement the client has provided. The date opened establishes the account's age, which matters both for scoring purposes and for the general credit-history guidelines discussed in Module 10.
A borrower disputing a trade line as 'not mine' will often point to a mismatched date opened or an unfamiliar creditor name as their first piece of evidence — knowing to check these fields carefully is useful when a client raises a dispute mid-file.
Every trade line carries an account type code that determines how its payment history is graded. R denotes revolving credit — credit cards and lines of credit, where the balance can go up and down and there is no fixed number of payments. I denotes installment credit — car loans, personal loans, student loans — with a fixed payment and a defined end date. O denotes open credit, typically accounts like charge cards that must be paid in full each period rather than carried as a balance. M denotes a mortgage specifically, reported with its own conventions given how central it is to the file.
This matters because the payment-history rating scale covered in Module 03 uses the same 0-through-9 numbering for all three of R, I and O, but the letter prefix changes what kind of account is being described — an R2 and an I2 mean the same thing about payment timeliness, on different kinds of credit.
For revolving accounts, the credit limit (sometimes called high credit) and the current balance together produce the utilization figure covered in depth in Module 05. For installment accounts, the equivalent figure is the original loan amount against the remaining balance, which behaves differently and is not read as a utilization percentage the same way.
The required payment field shows the minimum contractual payment the creditor expects — not necessarily what the borrower has actually been paying, which matters directly to the debt-servicing calculations in Course 05, where the required minimum, not the borrower's voluntary larger payment, is what typically gets used.
Most trade lines display a rolling payment history grid covering roughly the past 24 to 36 months, one rating code per month, giving a month-by-month timeline rather than just a single current status. This is important: an account that is perfectly current today can still show a 90-days-late rating from eight months ago sitting in that grid, and an underwriter reading the file will see both the current good standing and the recent rough patch.
Reading the grid left to right (or right to left, depending on the report layout) as a timeline, rather than only checking the single most recent entry, is the difference between catching a pattern of intermittent lateness and missing it entirely.
A trade line shows an account type of 'I2'. What does this tell you?
The letter tells you the kind of account (I for installment) and the number tells you the payment status on the shared 0-9 scale, where 2 indicates payment more than 30 but not more than 60 days late. The tempting wrong answer swaps in 'revolving,' which would be an R rather than an I — a common early mix-up since the numbering scale is identical across R, I and O and only the prefix changes what kind of credit is being described.
