No, credit freezes do not affect your credit score. While access to your credit reports is blocked, the information needed to create your credit score is not. Your payments and balances are still monitored. You can continue to work on increasing your credit score while the credit freeze is in place. Credit report freeze limitations A credit report freeze cannot protect you from identity theft that does not require access to your credit reports. You will still need to monitor your identity for problems such as tax or medical fraud, social network or reputation issues, government services fraud, or driver's license fraud. They also cannot protect your existing accounts such as open credit cards. Freezing your credit is just one part of protecting your identity from fraudsters. Credit freeze vs. fraud alert Credit freezes and fraud alerts are tools intended to help you protect your credit. A fraud alert tells creditors that you may be a victim of identity theft and that they should perform a more thorough vetting before extending credit. For example, if you are applying for a line of credit, the company should contact you to verify that you are indeed the person applying for credit. One advantage to fraud alerts is that you only have to place a request with one reporting agency and then that agency will share the information with the other two credit bureaus. Alerts are free to file and come with one free credit report. Credit freeze vs. credit lock Credit locks are services offered by credit monitoring agencies. Both credit freezes and credit locks are intended to protect access to your credit reports and score. Services usually require a monthly fee and may include products such as real-time alerts and identity theft insurance. Credit locks are simply an agreement between you and the credit monitoring company and they are not governed by the same laws as credit freezes. Since credit freezes are free and provide increased fraud protection, they are often chosen over credit locks.