Credit Freeze vs Credit Lock: The Bureaus Sell a Subscription for What the Law Gives You Free

TransUnion discontinued its own credit lock in 2025 and now offers a button that converts your lock into a freeze. When the company selling a thing quits selling the thing, believe it.

TransUnion spent years pitching its credit lock as the modern, app-friendly way to guard your file. Then, in the first half of 2025, it killed the lock, permanently shut down the products that carried it (TrueIdentity, TransUnion Credit Monitoring, and zendough), and added a Service Center feature its own site describes as "the option to replace your lock with a freeze." Meanwhile, every credit freeze vs credit lock comparison on page one of Google is written by a credit bureau, an insurer, or an identity-protection subscription company, and every one of them frames the decision as a matter of personal preference.

It is not a matter of personal preference. The freeze wins on cost, coverage, and legal standing, and one of the three companies selling the alternative has already conceded the argument by exiting the market.

The stakes here are not small. The FTC logged more than 1.1 million identity theft reports through IdentityTheft.gov in 2024, the same year consumers reported $12.5 billion in total fraud losses. Both a freeze and a lock target the most expensive flavor of identity theft: someone using your Social Security number to open a new credit card, loan, or phone plan in your name. A lender that cannot pull your credit report will not open the account. The question is which blocking tool to use, and the answer stopped being close years ago.

One of these is a federal law and the other is a terms-of-service agreement

A credit freeze (the statute calls it a security freeze) has been a federally guaranteed right since September 21, 2018, when the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act took effect. Under that law, all three bureaus must let you place, lift, and remove a freeze for free, forever. Request it online or by phone and the bureau has one business day to put it in place. Ask to lift it and the bureau has one hour. Even the slowest path, a mailed request, caps out at three business days after your letter arrives. Parents can place a free freeze for any child under 16, and the same law stretched fraud alerts from 90 days to a full year.

A credit lock has none of that scaffolding. It is a private contract between you and one bureau, governed by whatever terms the bureau wrote and reserves the right to rewrite. Christina Tetreault, a staff attorney at Consumers Union, put it plainly to Consumer Reports: "Having a contractual agreement is not as strong as having protections under law." She also flagged that lock agreements can include arbitration clauses, which means that if the lock fails and a fraudster opens an account anyway, your remedy may be whatever a private arbitrator says it is, not what the Fair Credit Reporting Act says it is.

The FTC drew the same line back when the freeze law took effect, in twelve words: "They work in a similar way, but locks may have monthly fees." That was the polite federal version of this article.

The lock math collapsed when TransUnion quit selling it

A blocking tool only works if all three of your credit files are blocked, because a lender can pull from Equifax, Experian, or TransUnion interchangeably. Lock two doors and a thief walks through the third. Here is what the lock side of the ledger actually looks like in 2026.

Equifax Lock & Alert is free, a peace offering dating to the 2017 breach that exposed the data of roughly 147 million people. It locks your Equifax file and nothing else; Equifax's own help pages direct you to the other two bureaus for the rest.

Experian CreditLock is sold only inside a premium identity subscription that runs $24.99 a month, which works out to roughly $300 a year. It locks your Experian file only. And per Experian's own product page, if you cancel the membership while locked, "your credit file will be unlocked at the end of the billing period." Protection that evaporates when your card declines is not protection. It is a subscription with a moat.

TransUnion discontinued its credit lock in 2025 and permanently shut down every consumer product that carried it. There is no TransUnion lock left to buy.

Add it up: the maximum lock coverage the bureaus themselves will sell you is two files out of three, one of them at $300 a year, with the TransUnion door permanently unlockable. A freeze covers three files out of three for $0, backed by federal law instead of a clickwrap agreement. There is no spreadsheet in which the lock comes out ahead. The bureaus marketed locks because the 2018 law banned them from charging for freezes, and a free legal right generates no recurring revenue. TransUnion's exit suggests even the bureaus have trouble keeping that pitch alive.

The freeze costs you one hour of inconvenience, occasionally

Freezes have real friction, and pretending otherwise is how vendor blog posts earn their bad reputation. The honest accounting: you must set up a separate account at each of the three bureaus, which takes about fifteen minutes total and involves the usual identity-verification quiz about old addresses and car loans you barely remember. You hold three sets of credentials instead of one app toggle. And when you actually apply for credit, a car loan, or sometimes an apartment or a new phone carrier, you have to thaw first.

That thaw is the entire case for locks, and the 2018 law gutted it. Bureaus must lift a freeze within one hour of an online or phone request. All three also let you schedule a temporary thaw with a set end date, so the freeze snaps back automatically after your mortgage lender pulls the file. Ask the lender which bureau it uses and you often only need to thaw one. The lock's "instant" toggle saves you, at best, about 59 minutes a few times a year, and at Experian those minutes cost $300 annually.

A freeze does not touch your credit score (we covered what actually moves your score in our credit improvement guide), does not affect your existing cards and loans, and does not stop you from checking your own reports. The fraud alert, the third tool in this drawer, is free for a year but weaker: it asks lenders to verify your identity rather than blocking the pull outright, and compliance is uneven. Treat it as a supplement for active fraud situations, not the main lock on the door.

Freezing all three bureaus takes about fifteen minutes

Open three tabs: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion each have a dedicated freeze page reachable by searching the bureau name plus "security freeze." Create an account at each, verify your identity, click freeze, and save the confirmation and any PIN somewhere you will find it in five years. Phone works if the websites fight you (the bureaus must still meet the one-business-day deadline), and certified mail exists for the patient. If you have kids under 16, mail in a protected consumer freeze for them too; children's clean files are a favorite target precisely because nobody checks them for a decade.

Then pull your free weekly reports at AnnualCreditReport.com a couple of times a year to confirm nothing slipped through. That is the whole system: $0, federally enforced, covering all three doors.

The bureaus built a paid product next to the free right Congress forced on them, marketed the pair as a coin flip, and then one of the three gave up and installed a button that converts the paid idea into the free one. Take the hint TransUnion is offering. Freeze all three files tonight.