You landed with fifteen years of spotless repayment behind you, and a US lender looked at you and saw nothing at all. Not a bad risk — no risk, which is worse, because a system built to price risk has no way to price an absence.

This is the single most disorienting part of arriving, and most advice about it is either wrong or several years out of date. Here is what actually determines the outcome.

Accurate as of August 2026. Card terms and issuer partnerships in this area change quickly — the mechanics below are stable, the product names are not.

Why your history vanished

Credit bureaus are national, commercial and unconnected. Experian operates in both the UK and the US, but the two files are separate businesses with separate data. Nobody is withholding your history; there is simply no pipe between the systems, and no US lender has any obligation to go looking.

So you are not starting from a low score. You are starting from no score — a state the industry calls "credit invisible", and one that a surprising number of lenders' automated systems handle worse than a genuinely poor score.

The one thing that can carry your history across

Nova Credit is the only real answer here, and almost nobody arriving has heard of it. Its Credit Passport pulls your file from a bureau in your home country and translates it into something a US underwriter can act on. Coverage spans around twenty countries, India among them, along with the UK, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines and others.

The reason you have not heard of it is structural: it is business-to-business infrastructure, not a consumer product. You cannot sign up with Nova Credit. It only exists for you at the moment you apply to a lender who happens to use it, and that lender rarely advertises the fact. Millions of people who could use it walk past it every year.

Two honest caveats. The partner list changes — American Express, long the best-known user, ended its partnership in 2025 — so the practical move is to check which issuers currently offer a Nova-powered application at the time you apply, rather than trusting any list, including this one.

The second one matters more, and it is where people go wrong: Credit Passport does not report to Experian, Equifax or TransUnion. It is read once, by one lender, at the moment you apply. It can get you approved on your genuine history instead of on nothing — which is the entire point, and worth a great deal — but it does not create a US credit file. Your file only starts building once the account it won you is open and reporting. Which is the question that decides whether any of this works.

Getting an ITIN, without paying for it

If you cannot get a Social Security number, an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number opens most of the same doors. The process is more forgiving than it looks, and the fee-charging services that dominate search results are optional.

• By post is free. Form W-7 with your tax return and supporting documents to the IRS Austin Service Center. Allow about seven weeks — nine to eleven if you file between mid-January and the end of April, or from outside the US.
• In person is also free at an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center that offers ITIN services. They authenticate your documents and hand them straight back at the end of the appointment, so your passport never goes in the post at all. Almost nobody knows this option exists. The catch nobody mentions either: it is appointment-only, and the IRS warns the appointment itself can take several weeks to get — so book it first and then decide, because posting the form can genuinely be quicker.
• VITA sites are free too, and will prepare your tax return as well if you qualify.
• Certifying Acceptance Agents do the same authentication and charge for it. Worth paying only if the free options are impractical where you live.

An ITIN is a tax number, not an immigration status and not permission to work. It exists so people can file returns and, usefully, so institutions have something to key an account to.

The only question that matters when choosing a first card

There are dozens of "build credit from zero" products and they are not equivalent. One question separates the useful from the waste of a year:

Does it report to all three bureaus — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion?

A card that reports to one bureau, or to none, builds a file that most lenders will not see. You make twelve months of payments, feel you are getting somewhere, and then apply for a car loan whose underwriter pulls the bureau your card never reported to — and finds nothing. The experience is indistinguishable from having done nothing at all.

Ask it before you apply, in those words, and get the answer in writing if you can. A product that is cagey about it is telling you the answer.

Two related traps:

• Some issuer-internal cards report only to that issuer. A few paths designed for new arrivals let you carry a relationship from a bank's operations in your home country. They are genuinely useful for getting approved — but if the account reports only within that issuer, it does not build the national file you actually need. Check specifically.
• A first card can be a one-time door. Some new-arrival products can only be used as your first US card, and some cannot have an ITIN or SSN added later. Ask what happens to the account once your status changes, before you open it, because these decisions are hard to unwind.

Where the money actually is

The brokerages are more accommodating than the banks and this surprises people. Fidelity and Schwab will generally open a brokerage account and an IRA on an ITIN; policies at other brokerages vary, so ask before applying. That matters more than a credit card in the first years: a card builds a file, but an IRA started three years earlier is worth real money by retirement.

Bank policies vary more than their websites suggest. An online application form that demands a Social Security number does not always mean the institution refuses ITINs — the same bank may open the account in a branch. If an online flow rejects you, ask in person before concluding you have been refused.

A realistic first eighteen months

1. Before you fly, download your home-country credit report while you still have easy access. It is far harder to obtain afterwards, and Nova Credit is not available everywhere.
2. In month one, get the tax number — SSN if you are eligible, otherwise start the W-7 at a Taxpayer Assistance Center.
3. Then apply where your history counts. Check for a Nova-powered application before defaulting to a secured card. Being approved on your actual history beats rebuilding it from nothing.
4. If that fails, take a secured card that reports to all three. Small recurring charge, paid in full automatically, and then leave it alone. Credit history rewards dullness.
5. Open the brokerage account early. It does not build credit, and it is probably worth more to you than the card.
6. Wait. Roughly six months of reported activity generates a score. The most common mistake now is applying for more products to speed things up, which does the opposite.

The uncomfortable part

There is no way to shortcut this that is not either a fee for something free or a product that reports nowhere useful. The system is not designed to recognise you and does not particularly want to; what it responds to is a boring, visible, national payment record accumulated over time.

The two moves that genuinely compress the timeline are the two nobody tells you about: check whether your history can be ported before you assume it cannot, and get the free version of the tax number instead of paying for it.