Renting With No Credit History: What to Show a Landlord

The application has a field for your current landlord, and you have never had one. Or it runs a credit check, and you already know what that check is going to find: nothing. Not a bad score. No score at all. And the application fee is spent whichever way this goes.

None of this matters if the unit itself has problems — see what to check at an apartment viewing for what to check before you even get to the application.

Here is the part nobody selling you a fix mentions first. Having no score is not rare, and it is not a verdict on you. It is a category — one the screening industry has known about for a decade and has built products around. Some of those cost nothing. One costs real money, and you should not buy it until you have asked one question. This article is about renting with no credit history: what a landlord’s system does with a thin file, and what you can put in front of it before you pay for anything.

Table of Contents

A missing score is a category, not a character reference

The number that gets quoted is that 26 million Americans are “credit invisible.” It comes from a 2015 report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which the CFPB itself now describes as “widely cited” — and in June 2025 the CFPB published a correction to its own work. In its words, the original estimate “should be roughly cut in half, with an almost commensurate increase in credit records that were unscored.”

The corrected picture, from the CFPB’s updated report: as of December 2020, about 2.7 percent of U.S. adults — roughly 7 million people — had no credit record at all, and another 9.8 percent had a record too thin or too old to produce a score. Add the two and 12.5 percent of U.S. adults — one in eight — had no usable score. (The report gives the two percentages separately; the sum is ours.) The CFPB is measuring the adult population, not rental applicants, so treat it as context rather than a rental statistic.

Two things follow. First, one in eight is not rare, so do not read a blank score as a verdict on you. Second, “no record” and “a record with no score” are different problems. A thin file — one account, a few months old — is not empty. It is not old enough to score yet: FICO’s own minimum for generating a score is at least one account open for six months or more, and at least one account reported to the bureau within the past six months. If you have had a student loan in your name or a secured card, you may have a file you have never seen. Pull your own reports, free, before anyone else does; our guide to tenant screening reports and your rights covers how to read one and what to do if it is wrong.

What the screening system does when there is nothing to score

A large property manager can run every application through a screening service. What comes back depends on the product and on what the landlord asked it to check — a credit file, an eviction-record search, income against rent — and some products add a recommendation: approve, deny, or approve with conditions. Feed one a blank score and it can come back conditional: approve with a co-signer, or approve with a larger deposit. That is not a no. It is a price, and a price can be negotiated or declined. One thing to know about that price: if it is imposed because of something in a screening report, it can count as an adverse action, and adverse actions come with rights. The rest of this article is about whether the price is fair, and what to offer instead.

A landlord with three units is a different reader. They may look at your file themselves, or not pull one at all. So ask, at the viewing, how they screen. It is a free question, and the answer tells you which of the sections below you actually need. So is the one that follows it, and it is the question this whole article comes down to: what will you accept in place of a score — income paperwork, bank statements, a co-signer, a larger deposit where the law allows it, a guarantor service — and which of those? Ask it before you pay an application fee, not after.

young renter on a phone call taking notes with a laptop nearby, daylight apartment

The four things you will be told to do, and the part that gets left out

A co-signer

For a first renter with a willing parent, this is the fix with no fee attached. But be clear about what you are asking. The person signing is not vouching for you. They are agreeing to pay if you do not — and how far that goes is written in the clause, not assumed. Before anyone signs, read the guaranty clause with them and get three answers. Does it cover only unpaid rent, or damage and fees as well? Does it end when this lease ends, or roll over each time you renew, for as long as you live there? Can the landlord collect from the co-signer directly, without first trying to collect from you? A co-signer who hears those three answers and still says yes is giving you something real. Ask the way you would want to be asked.

A guarantor service

Search this topic and one of the pages you will find is published by a company that sells lease guarantees. It calls the product “the most reliable option for renters with no credit history.” Nowhere on that page does it say what the product costs.

So here is what one costs, from a company that does publish it. Insurent’s own page for renters says its guaranty fee for U.S. applicants “will approximate 70% – 90% of a month’s rent for the one year lease guaranty,” paid in full before the lease is signed. On a $1,500 apartment — our example, not theirs — that is somewhere between $1,050 and $1,350 for the fee alone, before you have paid a deposit or a first month, and it buys one lease year. What a renewal costs is not on the page — ask before you count on staying.

Two more lines on the same page matter more than the price. To qualify as a U.S. applicant, Insurent asks for annual income of 27.5 times the monthly rent, or liquid assets of 50 times the rent, “and decent to good credit.” Read that twice. A product sold as the answer to thin credit can turn you down for thin credit. And if the company ever does pay your landlord, its terms say you “will be liable for any amounts paid on your behalf plus any legal fees incurred to collect those amounts from you,” and that your credit report “will be negatively affected.” It works like insurance — the company’s own terms call it the insurer — but you are not the one insured. The landlord is, with your name on the invoice.

None of that makes it a scam. In a market where a broker fee and a guarantor fee are the cost of getting any lease at all, it can be the difference between an apartment and none. But it is a last resort priced like a convenience, and the page quoted above is written by the people who collect the fee. Two checks before any money moves. First, ask the landlord whether they accept this particular company at all — landlords differ on which guarantor companies they will take. Second, ask what else they would accept. If a parent will co-sign and the landlord agrees, there is no fee. If your income clears 27.5 times the rent and your credit is already “decent to good,” you may not need it at all.

A bigger deposit

Offering a larger deposit is the other suggestion on every list, and it is the one that can run into the law. Offering is not the problem. Some states and some cities cap what a landlord may collect as a deposit, and a landlord who takes more than the cap is the one breaking the rule — but it is your money sitting on the wrong side of it. So before you offer, find the rule. Search your state’s name with “security deposit limit” and open a .gov result — the state attorney general, the state courts’ tenant guide, or the state housing agency — not a blog. HUD’s page for your state is a starting point for finding those agencies, but the rule itself lives in your state’s landlord-tenant law. If you cannot find it in ten minutes, ask the landlord to show you where the law allows the amount they are asking for.

If your state has a cap and a landlord accepts double it anyway, the deposit is outside the rule from day one. You will want that deposit back one day, and knowing the rule now is part of how you get it back then.

Where a bigger deposit is legal, weigh it against the guarantor fee honestly. Both tie up rent-sized money for a year. The deposit is refundable — less anything you owe under the lease and any damage beyond ordinary wear, under the rules where you live — and the deposit article above covers how to get it back. The fee is never refundable.

References, and the history you already have

Here is the thing the lists skip: you may already have a rental history. It is just not on a credit report. If you paid a parent or a roommate every month, your bank statements show it — the same amount, the same week, twelve times in a row. Print those. A short letter from the person you paid, with a phone number, is the closest thing to a landlord reference you can offer. Be honest about what it is: not a lease, not a tenancy anyone can verify in a database, but evidence of the habit a credit score is used as a shortcut for — paying the same amount, on the same day, on time. Add pay stubs, an employment or offer letter, and a bank balance that covers a few months of rent, and a private landlord has a real picture of you.

For a large management company, that paper carries less weight, because a person may never read it; the application may go straight to a screening service. So ask, before you pay the application fee, whether anyone will look at it. The question is free. The fee is not.

Building the file so the next application is easier

Ask a landlord you are about to sign with whether they report rent payments to the credit bureaus — the CFPB’s own advice is to ask, and to “consider any fees that might be charged for these services.” If they report and it is free, the rent you already pay starts building the history you were missing. If there is a fee, or they do not report, rent-reporting services exist for a monthly charge; before paying one, ask your bank or card issuer whether it offers rent reporting free. A secured card carrying one small recurring bill, paid in full every month, builds a different kind of history — a credit account rather than a rent record — at the same slow pace. None of this helps the application in front of you. All of it helps the next one.

The search you are tempted to run instead

“No credit check apartments.” It is right there in the suggested searches, and it feels like the shortcut. Before you take it, ask why this landlord has chosen not to look. Sometimes the answer is fine: a small landlord who screens by income and references and judges people in person. But ask the questions that reveal the other answers. Is the lease month-to-month? Is the rent higher than similar units nearby? Does rent have to be paid in cash? Who fixes things, and how fast? The answers tell you what “no credit check” is standing in for.

And a listing that promises no screening while asking for money before you have seen the unit has two of the marks our guide to rental listing scams walks through. Read it before you reply.

Sources

One more thing

The four fixes are not equal, and the order to try them is the order of what they cost you. The paper you already have costs nothing. A co-signer costs nothing, but it is real for the person signing. A bigger deposit is your money, returned if you earn it back. A guarantor service is your money, gone. Work down that list, not up it — and notice which end of it the page quoted above starts from.

If this is your first apartment, the First Apartment Guide walks the whole sequence in order, from finding the real number you can afford to the day you hand the keys back.