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Organizations are increasingly offering financial wellness programs as a workplace benefit, as they understand these programs are both good for their employees’ well-being and for their company’s bottom line. But there have been very few evaluations assessing these programs’ effectiveness. In this brief, we present findings of a pilot study of one such program: Working Credit NFP, a workplace benefit program designed to help employees establish and build strong credit scores and use their improved scores to enhance their financial circumstances.

The Urban Institute’s analysis of the Working Credit program between 2015 and 2017 suggests positive outcomes for participating employees: the share of participants with prime scores increased across all racial and ethnic identities and hourly wage levels, and the share of participants with debt in collections or delinquency declined over the 18-month program. Participants also increased the amount of affordable credit available to them in an emergency. Working Credit demonstrates that lower-wage workers can make impressive increases in their credit scores and can improve their availability of and access to credit.