Your score is low because your record is empty, not because anything went wrong.
A new account starts at the same published starting point as every other new account. Nothing about you was measured to get there. It is the number the scoring model uses when it has no evidence in either direction, and it is identical for a dentist with twenty years behind her and a school leaver in their first week.
Provisional does not mean risky
The bands, from the top: Distinguished, Established, Proven, Developing, Provisional, At Risk. New accounts sit in Provisional.
Provisional and At Risk sit next to each other and mean opposite things. This is the one part worth reading twice.
Provisional means there is no confirmed track record yet. Nobody has said anything bad about you. Nobody has said anything at all.
At Risk means adverse outcomes are actually on the record, and a third party confirmed them.
An absence of evidence is not evidence of failure. The scoring model says that in the band's own description, and the ladder on your dashboard is drawn with a break between those two rungs so they cannot be read as neighbors on a slide.
A self-employed electrician who signed up this morning is Provisional. So is one who signed up a year ago and never recorded anything. So would a fifty-person firm be. What each band means goes through all six.
Nobody decided this, and nobody can change it by hand
The score is a fixed calculation over what has been recorded. No member of Credda staff can raise it or lower it, and no AI is involved in the number. The same record always produces the same number.
That cuts both ways, and the second half is the useful half: nobody can nudge you up as a favor, and nobody can knock you down out of spite.
What moves it
Commitments you made and delivered, whether you delivered by the agreed date, whether anything was disputed, how much of your record somebody other than you confirmed, and whether one past employment role has been confirmed by a third party.
What does not move it is a longer list than most people expect, and it includes your education, your certificates, the name of the company you worked for, how long you stayed and what you pay Credda. Why your degree and your employer do not change your score sets out the whole of it.
How high can I get if nobody confirms anything?
Not far. Activity that nobody has confirmed tops out inside the Proven band. It cannot reach Established or Distinguished however much of it there is. Those need third-party confirmation.
The other end has a floor, today. Under the scoring model as published on August 10, 2026, a record with no third-party-confirmed outcomes cannot fall into At Risk. Only a confirmed adverse outcome can take a record there. That floor is a setting on the model rather than a permanent law, so if it matters to you, check the current model on the trust page rather than taking this sentence's word for it.
Good news counts slowly, bad news counts fast
Worth being straight about. It takes roughly six confirmed outcomes for the model to be confident about the good side of your record, or around ten unconfirmed ones. It takes about two confirmed breaches for it to be confident about the bad side.
That is deliberate, and it is not aimed at you. A high score that could be earned in a fortnight would be worth nothing to the person reading it.
What to do next
Nothing, if you do not need the record yet. A Provisional score is not a mark against you. Your record is not public until you publish it, and a share link only works for somebody you handed it to.
If you do want to move it: record work you are actually doing and ask the other side to confirm it. One confirmed job is worth more than fifty entries you typed in yourself. How to record finished work so a client can confirm it is the practical version.