A band is a plain summary of what has been recorded about how someone delivers work. It is not a rating of the person, and it is not advice about what to do.
Every Credda score sits in one of six bands. The band is worked out from the number, so the two can never disagree with each other. The exact cut-off for each band is published live by Credda and shown on the trust page, so this guide names the bands and says what they mean rather than printing numbers that could go out of date.
The six bands, highest first
These are Credda's own descriptions, as served.
Distinguished. A long, independently verified record of on-time delivery with no adverse outcomes.
Established. A solid verified track record; occasional lateness at most.
Proven. A real record with mixed outcomes, or strong activity that is not yet verified.
Developing. Some evidence, but too thin or too mixed to rely on yet.
Provisional. No verified track record. Deliberately not "risky": an absence of evidence is not evidence of failure.
At Risk. Adverse outcomes have pulled the record below the unproven anchor.
The two that get mistaken for each other
Provisional and At Risk sit next to each other at the bottom of the ladder and mean opposite things. If you take one thing from this guide, take this.
Provisional means nothing has been confirmed yet. A dental nurse who registered this morning is Provisional. So is a self-employed electrician with twenty years behind him and no customer who has confirmed a job on Credda. Provisional says Credda has nothing to go on.
At Risk is the other thing entirely. Outcomes were recorded, and they were bad enough to pull the record below the point where a record with nothing confirmed starts. That is what "below the unproven anchor" means in the description above.
Reading a Provisional record as a warning is reading a blank page as bad news.
What a record with no confirmations can and cannot reach
Two limits, both published on the live scoring model.
Activity that nobody else has confirmed has a ceiling. It tops out inside the Proven band. It cannot reach Established or Distinguished, however much of it there is. Confirmed outcomes are the only way past that ceiling.
Under the model published today, a record with no third-party-confirmed outcomes also has a floor: it cannot land in At Risk. So an unconfirmed complaint on its own can never band somebody At Risk. Only a confirmed adverse outcome can. That floor is a setting on the published model rather than a permanent property of Credda, so check the live model before you rely on it in writing.
Bad news lands faster than good news
A good record has to be built. It takes a run of confirmed outcomes before the score treats the pattern as settled, and that number is published too.
A confirmed breach gets no such patience. It counts heavily almost straight away and drives the score down hard.
So a high band is slow to earn and quick to lose. That is deliberate. A score that averaged a serious failure back into comfort would not be worth reading.
What the band does not tell you
It does not say whether to hire, book, approve or decline anyone. Credda records what happened and never says what to do about it.
It does not cover anything outside what was reported to Credda. No criminal, credit, identity or public-record check sits behind it.
It says nothing about work nobody reported. A corner shop owner who has run the shop for fifteen years and joined Credda last week starts in the same band as somebody who has never worked a day. A thin record means little was reported, not that little happened.