Credit card piggybacking is when you add someone else as an authorized user to help them improve their credit history and thus their credit score.

Adding someone as an authorized user is free and they will see that credit line appear on their report, which can help improve it.

Remember that the FICO credit score is made up for five factors:

If you add in a new credit line with a long history of on-time payments, you help improve Length of Credit History as well as Payment History, which make up 50% of the score.

The person you add doesn’t need to get the card itself. Just adding them will confer the benefits.

Minimum ages for authorized users

Some issuers have a minimum age for authorized users:

• American Express – 13
• Barclays – 13
• Discover – 15
• U.S. Bank – 13

The following banks do not list an age – Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and USAA.

If you want to help someone, find your oldest credit card and find out if there is an age requirement.

Some banks will not report the credit card for authorized users unless they are a certain age. American Express explains in their FAQ on Additional Card Members (emphasis mine):

Q. How does the Additional Card Member establish credit?

A. Credit information will be provided to the credit bureau for the Additional Card Member when they are 18 or older. The Additional Card Member builds only positive credit history based on the credit behavior of the Basic Card Member. If the Basic Card Member becomes delinquent at any point, we will discontinue reporting on the Additional Card Member’s Card in order to retain positive history on the Additional Card Member.

Are there downsides to credit piggybacking?

If you do not give the authorized user their card, there is zero downside.

If you do, the risk is that you are responsible for their spending. They may have been added as an authorized user but it is still your credit card – you are responsible for the debt and not the person that you added. If they don’t have the card, or the number of the card, there is no risk.

Do not pay for credit piggybacking

There are some credit repair companies who will claim that this strategy is fool-proof and in a sense they are correct, there’s no risk to doing this and it’s likely to help.

There is no guarantee.

Many companies have settled with the FTC for promising this.

It’s a part of your score but if your history is long and generally bad, adding an additional credit line is unlikely to improve your score significantly. The average credit line factor is an average, so adding one card when you have 5 bad ones is not going to have a big impact.

Adding an authorized user

Adding an authorized user is really easy – just log into the issuer’s website and it’s usually somewhere under Accounts or Account services. Here it is in Chase:

You will need a limited set of personal information to add an authorized user. For Chase, you don’t even need their Social Security Number but they will still report it to the bureaus.