Create user
For Plaid products and flows that use the user object, /user/create provides you a single token to access all data associated with the user. You must call this endpoint before calling /link/token/create if you are using any of the following: Plaid Check, Income Verification, Multi-Item Link, or Plaid Protect (Identity). If you are using Plaid Protect Link session scoring, you do not need to call /user/create first; Plaid will resolve or create the user when user.client_user_id is provided in /link/token/create. For customers who began using this endpoint on or after December 10, 2025, this endpoint takes a client_user_id and an identity object and will return a user_id. For customers who began using it before that date, the endpoint takes a client_user_id and a consumer_report_user_identity object and will return a user_token and user_id. For more details, see New User APIs. In order to create a Plaid Check Consumer Report for a user, the identity (new) or consumer_report_user_identity (legacy) object must be present. If it is not provided during the /user/create call, it can be added later by calling /user/update.
In order to generate a Plaid Check Consumer Report, the following identity fields, at minimum, are required and must be non-empty: name, date_of_birth, emails, phone_numbers, and addresses (with at least one email, phone number, and address designated as primary). Plaid Check Consumer Reports can only be created for US-based users; the user's address country must be US. If creating a report for sharing with a GSE such as Fannie or Freddie, the user's full SSN must be provided via the id_numbers field. Providing at least a partial SSN is also strongly recommended for all use cases, since it improves the accuracy of matching user records during compliance processes such as file disclosure, dispute, or security freeze requests.
When using Plaid Protect, it is highly recommended that you provide an identity object to better identify and block fraud across your Link sessions.
Plaid will normalize identity fields before storing them and utilize the same identity across different user-based products.
Headers
The HTTP header used in API requests to determine which set of User APIs to invoke: the legacy CRA version or the new User API version.
Request body
Example request
{
"identity": {
"id_numbers": [
{
"value": "123456789",
"type": "us_ssn"
}
]
}
}Response
OK