How do you know when balances are reported?

[SnackTrader]

Folks, you all have best intentions here, but the actual question the OP wants to ask is not WHEN the lenders update, but WHAT do the lenders update.

The answer for most companies is that they report the statement balance from the last day of a statement cycle. But that is not the case for all lenders. Of course, there is typically a small delay after that for the bureaus to actually feed that information into a personal credit report, so it takes something like 3-5 business days. But the timeframe of updating is rarely as important as the information that is reported, which is why paying cards down before the end of the statement cycle saves utilization %.

[DaveSignal]

I have one card, Military Star, that reports the current balance (not statement balance) towards the end of each month sometimes and sometimes at the beginning of the month, but never more than once a month....  sometimes it even alternates which CRAs it reports to.

But, I have a great system for controlling balances that report.  It might not work for everyone, but here is how I do it:   I have a lot of open credit cards with good sized total credit limit, but I only use one or two cards.   I just use my one, sometimes two, cards, and pay more than my full bill and then just continue using my card.  Whatever small amount accumulates over these few days I let report.   Since I have a large amount of other cards that I don't use at all, my utilization is very low and my total amount of used cards is a very small fraction.... both good for a FICO score.