What Credit Bureau Does Discover Pull?

Introduction

Find out what credit bureau (formally known as consumer reporting agencies) Discover pulls for credit card applications. For the purposes of this post, we only looked at data from 2014 onwards. We are also only looking at cards issued by Discover and not cards that run on their payment network.

You can also read other posts in this series by clicking below:

• American Express
• Bank of America
• Barclaycard
• Capital One
• Chase
• Citi
• U.S. Bank
• Wells Fargo

Table Key & Combined Stats

To keep things easy, we will use the following acronyms.

EX = Experian
EQ = Equifax
TU = TransUnion
NI = No information

The number next to the acronym represents the number of data points we have. In total we have 448 data points sourced from the Credit Boards Credit Pull page. Of those applications:

• 112 or ~25% of all applications pulled an Experian credit report
• 233 or ~52%  of all applications pulled an Equifax credit report
• 103 or ~23% of all applications pulled an TransUnion credit report

Abbrevation	State Name	Credit Bureau Pulled
AL	Alabama	EX: 2 EQ: 3
AK	Alaska	EX: 1 EQ: 1
AZ	Arizona	EX: 1 EQ:4
AR	Arkansas	TU: 2
CA	California (CA)	EX: 19 EQ: 44 TU: 17
CO	Colorado	EQ: 7
CT	Connecticut	EX: 1 EQ: 4 TU: 1
DE	Delaware	EQ: 1 TU: 1
FL	Florida	EX: 10 EQ: 21 TU: 12
GA	Georgia	EQ: 14 TU: 8
HI	Hawaii	EX: 2 EQ: 1
ID	Idaho	EX: 2
IL	Illinois	EX: 16 TU: 5
IN	Indiana	EX: 1 EQ: 4
IA	Iowa	EQ: 1
KS	Kansas	EX: 1 EQ: 2
KY	Kentucky	EQ: 2 TU: 1
LA	Louisiana	EX: 1 EQ: 4
ME	Maine	EQ: 2
MD	Maryland	EX: 2 EQ: 4 TU: 1
MA	Massachusetts	EX: 2 EQ: 8
MI	Michigan	EX: 2 EQ: 4 TU: 1
MN	Minnesota	EX: 4 EQ: 6
MS	Mississippi	EX: 1 EQ: 3 TU: 1
MO	Missouri	EX: 1 EQ: 4 TU: 1
MT	Montana	EQ: 1 TU: 2
NE	Nebraska	EX: 1
NV	Nevada	EQ: 8
NH	New Hampshire	EX: 1 EQ: 1
NJ	New Jersey	EQ: 9 TU: 1
NM	New Mexico	EQ: 1 TU: 1
NY	New York	EX: 7 EQ: 30 TU: 8
NC	North Carolina	EX: 6 EX: 3 TU: 8
ND	North Dakota	EQ: 1
OH	Ohio	EX: 7 EQ: 11 TU: 2
OK	Oklahoma	N/A
OR	Oregon	EX: 1 EQ: 2 TU: 1
PA	Pennsylvania	EX: 3 EQ: 12 TU: 3
RI	Rhode Island	N/A
SC	South Carolina	EX: 2 EQ: 3 TU: 1
SD	South Dakota	EQ: 1
TN	Tennessee	EX: 1 TU: 1
TX	Texas	EX: 11 EQ: 30 TU: 15
UT	Utah	EQ: 1
VT	Vermont	TU: 1
VA	Virginia	EX: 1 EQ: 5 TU: 2
WA	Washington	EX: 2 EQ: 5 TU: 2
WV	West Virginia	EQ: 1 TU: 1
WI	Wisconsin	EX: 3 EQ: 1 TU: 5
WY	Wyoming	N/A
DC	District Of Colombia	N/A

What Happens If Your Report Is Frozen?

Discover won’t approve you with a frozen report, they also won’t accept a PIN to access a frozen report. Instead you’ll need to unfreeze your report first.

Our Verdict

As you can see Equifax is used more than half the time with the other two bureaus nearly being pulled one quarter of the time each. Discover doesn’t have a lot of cards worth considering, mainly just the Discover it & Discover it Miles (and possibly the Discover it Secured for people with bad credit).