For most of the last decade, a Buy Now, Pay Later loan lived a double life. It showed up in your bank statement and in the app that issued it. It did not show up on the document that three-digit credit scores are built from. A lender pulling your file saw someone with no auto loan and no credit card, and the paperwork gave no hint that this person had four payment plans running at once across three different apps. In 2026, that gap is closing. It is not closed.

The score that exists on paper

FICO announced its fix on June 23, 2025. Two new models, called FICO Score 10 BNPL and FICO Score 10 T BNPL, add pay-over-time loans into a credit score without letting them wreck it. The engineering problem was real. A shopper who splits one sofa into four biweekly payments through three different BNPL apps looks, to an ordinary scoring model, like someone who opened three new loans in a month, which is exactly the kind of behavior that tanks a score. FICO's answer, per that announcement, aggregates separate BNPL loans together inside the model rather than penalizing each one as its own red flag. The models grew out of a year-long joint study with Affirm covering roughly 500,000 consumers.

That is the design. The rollout is a different story. FICO targeted a fall 2025 launch, and by the time Benzinga checked in on June 1, 2026, the bureaus had the BNPL data, the scoring models existed, and not one lender had gone on record saying it underwrites with them. FICO built the new scores to run alongside its older ones at no extra cost to lenders, which removes the obvious excuse. Adoption is still a decision a bank makes out loud, on an earnings call, and so far none has.

Who is actually sending data, and to whom

  • Affirm reports all of its pay-over-time loans, including Pay in 4, to Experian as of April 1, 2025, and to TransUnion for loans issued from May 1, 2025 onward, per the companies' March and April 2025 announcements.
  • Klarna reports its Monthly installment product, though not Pay in 4, Pay in 30, or Pay in Full, to Experian and TransUnion, and says on its own help page that the data will not affect your score because only you can currently see it.
  • Afterpay does not report by default. Customers can opt into Experian reporting under a partnership that dates to 2024, and most activity never reaches a bureau unless they do, according to Firstcard's reporting on March 18, 2026.

Affirm's own November 25, 2025 announcement admitted the catch behind all of it. The loans sit in your Experian and TransUnion file, visible to you. They are not visible to other lenders, and they do not move your score, because the industry has not agreed on a shared standard and most competitors still are not furnishing everything. Affirm used the release to ask the rest of the BNPL industry and the bureaus to get in line. So far, nobody has answered.

The debt regulators could not see

The reason any of this started is a problem the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond described in a January 2025 research brief as phantom debt. Most BNPL loans were not reported anywhere, so a mortgage lender, a credit card issuer, or another BNPL app evaluating your application had no way to see them. The CFPB put a number on what that blindness allowed, in research published January 13, 2025. Sixty-three percent of BNPL borrowers took out multiple loans at the same time within a given year, and a third borrowed from more than one BNPL lender simultaneously. Nearly two-thirds of BNPL loans went to people who already had lower credit scores. Every lender in that chain was underwriting blind to what the others had already approved.

Does paying on time actually help

This is the part worth having real numbers for, and FICO has some. Its year-long study with Affirm found that for more than 85 percent of consumers, adding BNPL history moved a simulated score within 10 points, up or down. That is not a windfall for the credit-invisible shopper hoping four on-time payments on a pair of sneakers builds a file out of nothing. It is also not a disaster for the ordinary occasional user. The pattern both FICO and the Richmond Fed keep circling back to is the one the CFPB measured: several plans open at once, invisible to everyone until the total gets large enough to matter. That is what the aggregation model was actually built to catch.

Scale helps explain why nobody is panicking yet. A Richmond Fed brief published February 11, 2026 put total BNPL volume at about $70 billion in 2025, a little over 1 percent of credit card spending. Late payments are the softer spot. The same brief found that 41 percent of BNPL users reported one in the past year, up from 34 percent, citing a 2025 LendingTree survey.

The rule that came and went

There was briefly a federal answer to the phantom debt problem. In May 2024, the CFPB issued an interpretive rule treating Pay-in-4 BNPL lenders like credit card issuers under Regulation Z, which would have required the same billing dispute rights and periodic statements credit cards carry. It never got the chance to bite. The CFPB withdrew it, along with dozens of other guidance documents, effective May 12, 2025, citing deregulation directives and a preference for guidance that lowers compliance burden rather than adding to it. Federal oversight retreated at almost the exact moment the reporting infrastructure went live. States did not wait around. New York moved first, and Illinois followed on June 25, 2026, when Governor Pritzker signed a law capping BNPL APR at 36 percent and requiring lenders to check whether a borrower can actually repay before approving the next plan.

So the honest state of Buy Now, Pay Later and your credit file, in the summer of 2026, is unglamorous. The reporting mostly exists. The score built to read it is sitting in a lab, waiting for a bank willing to go first.

General guidance, not financial advice. Pull your own Experian and TransUnion files at annualcreditreport.com to see whether your BNPL loans currently appear. Questions go through our contact page.