Credit Repair New Brunswick: Your Rights, the Free Process and the Debt Routes Behind the File

By Salvador Bernardo, Credit Specialist at FixMyCredit.ca · Published September 18, 2026 · Last updated September 18, 2026

Credit repair New Brunswick residents can rely on is the newest and, after Ontario’s, the strictest framework in Canada. The Credit Reporting Services Act, in force since October 2018 and administered by the Financial and Consumer Services Commission, licenses the reporting agencies, gives you a free copy of your file and its recipient list once a year, a statement of dispute that rides on every future report, a free security alert, and six-year limits on debts, judgments and bankruptcies. It also writes the rules for credit repairers directly into the Act: a written agreement, no payment of any kind until the company causes a material improvement, and ten days to cancel.

This guide covers the New Brunswick rules, the free process, the debt side behind most damaged files, including the province’s unusual wage rules, and what no company can do.

What Credit Repair Means in New Brunswick

Credit repair New Brunswick law recognizes is the correction of information on your credit file that is inaccurate, incomplete, unverifiable or too old to report, plus the rebuilding of a damaged file with new on-time history. It is never the removal of accurate negative information; no company, lawyer or software can do that in any province.

New Brunswick had no credit reporting law at all until the Credit Reporting Services Act was passed in 2017 and brought into force on October 1, 2018, together with the Commission’s rules on licensing, fees and credit repair agreements. The Act now calls the bureaus “credit reporting agencies”, requires them to be licensed, limits what they may report and for how long, and, unusually, regulates the people who sell credit repair. Our national credit repair guide covers the mechanics common to every province; this page covers what is specifically New Brunswick.

Your Credit Repair New Brunswick Rights Under the Credit Reporting Services Act

Six rights under the Act do most of the work of credit repair New Brunswick residents handle themselves, and none of them costs anything:

• A free copy once a year, and after any refusal. On written request the agency must disclose, within a reasonable time, the nature and substance of all the information on you, its sources, the names of every end-user it gave a report to in the past year, and the reports themselves. That disclosure is free once per calendar year and free again whenever a lender’s refusal cites the file. Pull both files, because Equifax and TransUnion hold different data.
• Notice when a report costs you. An end-user that turns you down or charges you more because of a report must notify you within fifteen days, and you have sixty days to ask which agency it used.
• The right to dispute. The agency must, within a reasonable time, use its best endeavours to confirm or complete the information and correct, supplement or delete it, give you written notice of the result and a free corrected copy, and send the corrected report to any end-user you name from those it supplied in the previous six months.
• A statement of dispute on every future report. If the item stands, you may provide a statement declaring that a dispute exists, and the agency must include it with that item in every later report. It may limit the statement to 700 characters after giving you notice.
• A free security alert. You can ask the agency to place a security alert on your file telling end-users to verify your identity before proceeding, through a free 24-hour number the agency must provide; end-users must comply.
• No waivers. Any attempt to make you sign away these rights is void, and every agency must run a toll-free number.

Complaints go to the Financial and Consumer Services Commission at 1-866-933-2222.

How Long Negative Items Stay on a New Brunswick Credit File

The Credit Reporting Services Act sets six-year limits that line up with the bureaus’ own national schedules, so for a New Brunswick resident the dates below are both the law and the practice:

Item	New Brunswick rule	Bureau practice
Debt (late payments, collections, defaults)	Not more than 6 years after the last payment, or after the default if none was made, unless the creditor confirms in the file that the debt is not statute-barred	6 years from the date reported or the first missed payment
Taxes, fines and penalties	Not more than 6 years after they were imposed	6 years
Judgment	Not more than 6 years after it was given, unless the creditor confirms it is unpaid	6 years
Single bankruptcy	Not once discharged and more than 6 years have passed since the discharge	6 years after discharge
Two bankruptcies	The first drops 6 years after its discharge, the second 12 years after its discharge	14 years
Conviction	Not more than 6 years after conviction or release; never once a pardon or record suspension is in effect	6 years
Charge dismissed, withdrawn or discharged	Never	never
Any other adverse item	Not more than 6 years after it was acquired or last reaffirmed	6 years
Consumer proposal	Falls under the debt rule	3 years after you finish paying, or 6 years from filing, whichever is first

The Act also bars an agency from keeping or reporting your health or medical history, a disability, your gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, political belief, creed, religion, race, colour, ancestry or national origin. Two credit repair New Brunswick tactics follow from the table: an item still showing past its date is the easiest dispute you will ever file, and nobody can shorten those dates for a fee.

Credit Repairers: The New Brunswick Rules

New Brunswick is, with Ontario, one of only two provinces whose statute speaks directly to credit repair. The Credit Reporting Services Act and the Commission’s Rule CRS-003 give credit repair New Brunswick customers these protections whether or not the company mentions them:

• A written agreement in the prescribed form, with a copy delivered to you, carrying the required terms and a “Your Rights” statement.
• No payment of any kind before results. A credit repairer may not require or accept any payment, or any security for a payment, until it causes a material improvement to your file; security taken in breach is void, and taking an advance fee is an offence.
• Ten days to cancel, no reason needed and no charge, from the day you receive your written copy, and up to one year if you never received one. Refunds are due within fifteen days.
• No false claims. A credit repairer may not claim to be approved, licensed or regulated by the government or the Commission, and may not claim it will be able to cause a material improvement unless it has examined your file and reasonably concluded that a correction would do so.
• Personal liability. Officers and directors are jointly and severally liable for what the company owes you under the Act.

The honest reading of those rules is that a company earning its fee in New Brunswick can only do so by achieving what you could also do free: a correction through the same bureau process. Where it may earn the money is persistence on a messy file with many errors. Where it cannot is a clean, accurate file, and our review of credit repair companies in Canada lists the seven questions to ask before you sign anything.

Credit Repair New Brunswick, Step by Step

Done in this order, the credit repair New Brunswick residents do themselves takes an evening of work and then a calendar:

1. Pull both files and the recipient lists. Make a written request to Equifax and to TransUnion for your free annual disclosure, including the end-users who received a report in the past year. Read every account, address, inquiry and public record.
2. Sort every negative item into three piles. Wrong (not yours, wrong amount, wrong dates, paid but showing unpaid), expired (past the six-year date in the table above, or in a category the Act bans outright), and true. Only the first two get disputed.
3. Dispute in writing, one item per request, with evidence attached. The paid-in-full letter, the statement showing the real balance, the discharge certificate. The agency must confirm or complete the information within a reasonable time, tell you in writing and send you a free corrected copy.
4. Name the lenders who should get the correction. The Act lets you designate end-users from the previous six months to receive the corrected report.
5. Add a statement of dispute where the agency will not budge. Up to 700 characters, attached to that item on every future report.
6. Place a security alert if fraud is in the picture. It is free, and end-users must verify your identity before proceeding.
7. Rebuild with new history. A secured card or a small credit-builder loan reported to both bureaus, paid in full every month, is what moves the score once the file is accurate. Our guide to building credit in Canada covers the order that works.
8. Re-check both files at 30 and 90 days. Disputed items should be corrected or gone; new accounts should be reporting.

The Debt Side of Credit Repair New Brunswick: Limitation Period, Wages and the Routes

Most damaged New Brunswick files were damaged by debt, not by errors, and three provincial rules decide how that debt behaves while you repair the file:

• The two-year limitation period. Under the Limitation of Actions Act a creditor or collector has two years from discovering the claim, in practice from the last payment or written acknowledgment, to sue on most consumer debts, with an ultimate limit of fifteen years. After that the debt can still be reported inside the six-year window but cannot be enforced in court, and the reporting rule itself requires a creditor to confirm the debt is not statute-barred. A new payment or a written promise can restart the clock.
• Wages: an old exemption and a new enforcement act. For decades the Garnishee Act exempted wages for personal labour from garnishment entirely, and it still says so. Since the Enforcement of Money Judgments Act came into force, however, a sheriff can collect from a judgment debtor’s employment income, first by direct collection and then through a payment order to the employer, but only the part not needed to meet the reasonable needs of you and your dependants; the sheriff determines that exempt amount, and there is no fixed percentage. Our guide to collection agency rights covers what a collector may and may not do before any of that.
• Licensed collectors. Collection agencies and collectors in New Brunswick must be licensed under the Collection and Debt Settlement Services Act, administered by the same Commission; an unlicensed collector has no standing to demand anything.

When the balances are the problem rather than the reporting, New Brunswick households should know that the Orderly Payment of Debts program under Part X of the federal Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act does not operate here. That leaves four routes: a consolidation arrangement through a lender when credit still qualifies, a non-profit debt management plan through Credit Counselling Services of Atlantic Canada, which is based in Saint John, that freezes interest and repays in full with an R7 while it runs, a consumer proposal through a Licensed Insolvency Trustee that repays a portion and stops enforcement in motion, and bankruptcy last. Our debt consolidation guide compares every route and its credit impact.

Does It Matter Where in New Brunswick You Live?

No. Every rule on this page is provincial, so the credit repair New Brunswick residents do in a Moncton apartment is the same process as in Fredericton, Saint John, Bathurst or Edmundston, in English or in French: the same two bureaus, the same free annual disclosure, the same 700-character statement, the same Commission. The bureaus, the non-profit counsellors and the Licensed Insolvency Trustees all work by phone and online across the whole province, and the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy’s Halifax office serves New Brunswick for the paperwork that ever needs one. Nothing in this process requires an office visit, and the free assessment that starts it is a phone call wherever you live.

Credit Repair New Brunswick Red Flags

Because New Brunswick’s rules are so specific, most bad actors reveal themselves by breaking one of them. Walk away from any credit repair New Brunswick offer that involves:

• Any payment, deposit or security before a material improvement. Illegal outright, and taking it is an offence.
• No written agreement in the prescribed form, or one without the “Your Rights” statement. Both are required, and their absence gives you a year to cancel.
• A claim to be licensed or approved by the government or the Commission. Credit repairers are not licensed in New Brunswick and may not say they are.
• A promised improvement before anyone has looked at your file. The Act bars that promise unless the company has examined the file and reasonably concluded a correction would help.
• Advice to stop paying creditors while the company “negotiates”. That is the debt settlement model, it creates new negative items, and settlement services have their own licence rules here.
• A “new credit identity”, a second SIN or a business number to borrow under. That is fraud.
• Pressure to sign today. The ten-day cancellation period exists because the law expects pressure; use it.

Credit Repair New Brunswick FAQ

Related reading: our guide to removing late payments from your credit report covers the most common dispute, and how long bad credit stays on your report walks through the purge dates item by item.

About the Author

FixMyCredit.ca is a free information and referral service, not a lender, credit reporting agency, credit repairer or law firm. We never charge fees, never promise outcomes, and never ask you to pay anyone in advance. New Brunswick’s Credit Reporting Services Act and Rule CRS-003, Limitation of Actions Act, Garnishee Act, Enforcement of Money Judgments Act and Collection and Debt Settlement Services Act are summarized here in plain language and can change; confirm current details with the Financial and Consumer Services Commission, Equifax or TransUnion. Content is general information, not legal or financial advice.