I recently made two fairly large payments using my flex card each were about 1,500. One of the transactions was never collected by the merchant and stayed in a pending state until it was refunded to me.
Monzo has however reported my credit usage to bureaus with both transactions, resulting in a ding to my score as having both meant that I was using 90% of my limit.
I’m not sure if this was an intentional decision or not, but pending transactions should be excluded from reporting until they have been finalized.
You’re right that the actual score doesn’t matter, but if you’re wanting a mortgage or other credit, the usage reported does matter. Mind you, it does result in peculiarities like your usage going down if your credit limit goes up, even if the balances remain the same.
I’m no expert, but I can tell you from personal experience:
What banks/credit lenders report is usually based on your “availble balance” at the time they send the report. So since you had a pending transaction, your available balance was reduced and will show as such on your credit report.
Once the pending transaction is returned, the updated balance is included in next report sent by the bank, and should retroactively update the previous data (if the bank has done things correctly).
What you also need to consider is that banks may only update your report once a month, or once a week. Sometime even more often than that. The credit reference agencies usually update your report within a few days of recieving new data.
However, most free credit report sites (CreditKarma, ClearScore, MSE, etc.) only update their records once a month so if you use these you won’t see any update until the month after.
If you want a more “live” version, you will likely need to pay and even then it’s usually only for 1 of the credit reference agencies.
(Personal recommendation is to use CheckMyFile.com, which pulls in all 4 credit report agencies daily, and let’s you compare the data across all of them. It is expensive (£14.99 a month with a 30 day free trial) but after being a victim of ID theft last year, I think it’s worth it).
It’s also quite dependant on when you pay the credit card bill. Mine are generally billed about the 20th so payable by the 10th or so. However, if I pay the bills before the end of the month, my reported usage is obviously a lot lower than if I leave it to the start of the month.
I’m a bit more sensitive about all this at the moment as it’s remortgage time
