Anecdotal reports on MyFico and Reddit indicate that U.S. Bank now reports to credit bureaus your card balances that appeared on statement close.
For years, U.S. Bank has been the outlier among major credit card issuers to report your card balances to the credit bureaus based on your balance on the last day of the month. Your statement close balance was not relevant. Over the past few weeks, people have been noticing their statement close balance getting reported to the credit bureaus. Presumably, U.S. Bank will now be like all other major banks and report only your statement close balances, not your end-of-month balances.
This all matters for credit score optimizers who like to keep their reported card balances near zero in order to keep their credit scores high due to low utilization. With most banks, I regularly pay down my card balances before the statement closes, and with U.S. Bank I’ve always ignored the statement close and paid it down before the end of the calendar month. Going forward, I’ll switch to paying down my U.S. Bank cards before statement close.
We’ll have to wait and see over the next few months to confirm this change pans out as expected.
