Metro 2 ECOA Codes (Field 10)

The ECOA Code is the field that answers the question every downstream user of a credit report actually cares about: who is on the hook for this debt. It is named for the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which is why the designator exists at all -- lenders are required to report a spouse's or co-applicant's participation accurately rather than folding two people's credit into one person's file. In Metro 2 terms it is the liability designator, and it is reported once for the primary consumer in the Base Segment and again, separately, for every associated consumer carried in a J1 or J2 segment.

That per-consumer repetition is the single most important structural fact about this field. A joint account is not one record with one ECOA code. It is a Base Segment carrying ECOA 2 for the primary consumer plus a J1 or J2 segment carrying its own ECOA 2 for the co-obligor. Reporting ECOA 2 in the Base Segment with no associated-consumer segment behind it is a contradiction: you have asserted joint contractual liability and then named only one person. The inverse mistake is just as common, sending a J1 segment for a spouse who never signed anything and giving that segment a liability code instead of the authorized-user code.

The codes split into four working groups. Codes 1, 2, 5 and 7 all describe someone who can be sued for the balance, in descending order of directness: sole borrower, equal joint obligor, contingent co-maker or guarantor, and the maker of a business obligation backed by a personal guarantee. Code 3 is the odd one out and the most frequently misused value in the entire format -- an authorized user has spending access and no contractual liability at all, so the delinquency arithmetic that applies to a joint obligor must not be applied to them. Code W says the account is commercial rather than consumer credit. Codes T, X and Z are lifecycle instructions rather than steady-state designators: terminate the relationship, mark the consumer deceased, or delete this one consumer from the tradeline.

Two set-wide cross-field rules are worth internalizing before you look at any individual code. First, ECOA Z deletes ONE consumer from an account that keeps reporting; Account Status DA deletes the entire tradeline. Furnishers who confuse the two either strand a co-obligor on an account that should be gone or wipe a tradeline when they meant to remove an authorized user. Second, ECOA X has to stay consistent with the Consumer Information Indicator's deceased values and with the segment the deceased consumer actually occupies, because a validator that sees a deceased designator on one field and a living-consumer indicator on another will reject the record rather than guess. The 2026 CRRG revision clarified reporting expectations around ECOA X specifically; confirm the current wording against your own copy of the 2026 CRRG before you change how your extract populates that code.