How to Opt Out of Prescreened Credit Offers (and What It Stops)

To opt out of prescreened offers of credit and insurance, go to OptOutPrescreen.com or call 1-888-5-OPT-OUT (1-888-567-8688). Doing it online or by phone takes you off the lists for five years. To opt out permanently, start the same way and then mail in the signed form the system gives you. The bureaus have five business days to process it, though offers already in the pipeline can keep arriving for a few weeks.

That covers the how. The part most people get wrong is the what. The opt-out shuts one specific door, and a lot of the mail, calls and texts people hope it’ll stop come through other ones.

What a prescreened offer actually is

A letter saying you’re “pre-approved” for a card usually starts like this. A lender gave a credit bureau a set of criteria (say, a FICO® Score above 700, no recent delinquencies, in these ZIP codes). The bureau ran its files against those criteria and handed back names and addresses of people who matched. The lender mailed them.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act allows this in 15 U.S.C. § 1681b(c), with conditions. The big one: the offer has to be a “firm offer of credit or insurance.” The lender can still verify your information and check that you still meet the criteria when you respond, but it can’t just collect names.

A few details that might surprise you:

• The lender only gets your name, address and the fact that you met its criteria, not your full report.
• It’s a soft inquiry. It shows up on your own copy of your report, but it doesn’t affect your score.
• If your file shows you’re under 21, you can’t be included unless you’ve consented.

How to opt out of prescreened offers, step by step

The five-year opt-out (online or phone)

1. Go to OptOutPrescreen.com, or call 1-888-567-8688.
2. Choose the electronic opt-out for five years.
3. Enter your identifying details. Expect to be asked for your name, current and recent addresses, and typically your Social Security number and date of birth, so the bureaus can match you to the right file.
4. Submit. That’s it.

The CFPB’s guidance confirms the request covers all three nationwide bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) plus Innovis, and that the bureaus implement it within five business days.

The permanent opt-out (by mail)

Start online or by phone, and choose the permanent option. You’ll get a Permanent Opt-Out Election form to sign and mail. The statute is explicit about the difference: an electronic or phone election lasts five years, while a signed notice of election lasts until you say otherwise. (§ 1681b(e) spells out both.)

Is permanent worth the stamp? If you’re confident you won’t want pre-approved offers again, yes. Otherwise five years is a reasonable middle ground, and you can always come back.

What opting out stops

Once it’s in effect, the bureaus stop including you in prescreened lists for credit and insurance offers. In practice that means fewer:

• “You’re pre-approved” credit card mailers
• Pre-selected personal loan and auto refinance offers
• Prescreened insurance offers based on your credit file

Fewer of those means less mail with your name, address and an easy-to-activate offer sitting in a mailbox anyone can open, which is a modest but real identity theft win.

What it doesn’t stop

Offers from companies you already do business with. Your current bank or card issuer can keep marketing to you. The CFPB notes card issuers can still solicit you if they’ve done business with you before or get your name from other sources.

Mail from lists that don’t come from the bureaus. Catalogs, retail flyers, charities and plenty of general marketing come from other data sources. For those, the marketing industry runs DMAchoice, a separate mail preference service.

Phone calls and texts. Prescreening is about mail offers built from credit files. Telemarketing calls are a different law and a different list: the National Do Not Call Registry. (Businesses calling or texting leads have their own consent rules under the TCPA, which we cover in calling and texting leads.)

Credit checks with a permissible purpose. Opting out doesn’t stop a lender from checking your credit when you apply, a landlord from screening you when you submit a rental application, or anyone from looking you up with your OK. It doesn’t stop existing creditors from reviewing your accounts either. (If you’re curious which of those show up on your report, see who checked my credit, and for the legal reasons that let someone check, see permissible purpose under the FCRA.)

Your score. Nothing changes, in either direction.

A freeze won’t stop them either

This catches a lot of careful people. A credit freeze is great at blocking new accounts in your name, but federal law carves prescreening out of it on purpose. Among the exceptions listed in 15 U.S.C. § 1681c-1 is anyone using your file for the prescreening purposes in § 1681b(c). So a frozen file can still land you on a pre-approved mailing list.

If you want both protections, do both: freeze each bureau, then opt out once. We compare the tools in credit freeze vs. credit lock.

The mortgage “trigger lead” change

If you’ve applied for a mortgage, you may remember the flood of calls that followed from other lenders who’d never heard of you until the moment your lender pulled your credit. Those were trigger leads: the bureau sold the fact of your mortgage inquiry to competitors.

The Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act, signed in September 2025, added new limits that took effect in March 2026. Now, when your credit is pulled for a residential mortgage, the bureau can only pass that on as a prescreened lead to companies making a firm offer that either have your authorization, originated or service your current mortgage, or are a bank or credit union where you already have an account. The text is now part of § 1681b(c)(4).

Opting out still helps here. A trigger lead is a prescreened list, so an opt-out keeps you off it entirely. It’s a smart move to make a few weeks before you start shopping for a home loan, and our post on qualifying mortgage leads covers the lender side of the same rule.

Telling a real prescreened offer from a fake one

Opting out has a side benefit: once the real offers stop, anything that still says “pre-approved” deserves a harder look.

Legitimate prescreened offers have a few things in common. They include the opt-out notice, usually in a box on the first page, telling you that the offer is based on your credit report and how to stop future ones. They come from a lender you can look up independently. And they never ask you to pay anything before you’re approved.

Fake ones tend to break those rules. Watch for:

• An upfront fee for “insurance,” “processing” or “guaranteeing” the loan. Legitimate lenders don’t ask for a gift card, a wire or a payment app transfer before you’ve been approved.
• “Guaranteed approval” with no credit check at all. A real firm offer still lets the lender verify your information.
• A phone number or website that doesn’t match the lender’s real one. Look up the company yourself instead of using the contact details in the letter.
• Pressure to act today. Real offers come with an expiration date, not a countdown.

If a letter looks off, don’t call the number on it. Go to the lender’s own site, or toss it. And remember that a pre-approval letter isn’t your credit report. If you want to see what’s actually on file, the difference between the two is covered in credit report vs. credit score.

Should you opt out?

Our honest take: most people who don’t want the mail should do it. It’s free, it takes five minutes, and it’s reversible.

The trade-off is small but real. Some prescreened offers are good ones, such as a balance transfer deal or a car refinance that would save you money. Without them, you’ll have to go looking for those deals yourself. That’s what most savvy borrowers do anyway.

And a pre-approval was never a guarantee. When you respond, the lender can verify your information and check that you still meet its criteria before approving you. A real application will then usually mean a hard inquiry. If the difference between those is fuzzy, here’s soft pull vs. hard pull.

For businesses that mail prescreened offers

If you’re on the other side of this, every prescreened offer has to carry a clear notice telling consumers about their right to opt out and how to do it. The format rules (a short notice on the front, a longer one elsewhere) are in Regulation V at 12 CFR § 1022.54. Skipping it is a fast way to turn a marketing campaign into an enforcement problem.

That’s also why we don’t do prescreening at all. Every lookup on our service is tied to a specific person and a specific permissible purpose, most often their own OK. Our compliance page lays out the rules in plain English.

One more tip: put a note in your calendar for four years and eleven months from today if you choose the five-year option. When it lapses, the mailers come back quietly, and most people don’t notice until the pile has grown back.