so ive been working on DXCC for about 2 years now and my log shows i have contacts with 96 countries but when i look at my lotw credit report it only shows 89 credits. some of them i know i dont have qsl confirmations yet but there are at least 4 or 5 that show confirmed in my logging software but arent showing up in the dxcc credit matrix.

is this normal? do i need to resubmit some of these or am i missing something obvious here. been trying to figure out if its a date issue or maybe some of the contacts dont meet the dxcc entity rules but honestly the whole thing is pretty confusing

yeah this happens more than you'd think - your logging software and the actual DXCC credits can get out of sync pretty easily. couple things to check first: make sure the callsigns match exactly between your log and what got confirmed, sometimes theres typos or the other station used a slightly different call. also check the dates - if you logged something on say march 15th but their qsl shows march 14th it might not match up automatically

another thing is some of those countries might have changed entity status over time or there could be band/mode mismatches. ive found its easier to just go through the credit matrix line by line and compare it to your log rather than trying to figure out where the discrepancies are

I had the exact same problem when I was working toward my first DXCC! Turned out I had a few QSOs with stations that were portable or /MM and they didn't qualify for the entity credit I thought they did. One was a station I worked in what I thought was Greenland but he was actually /OZ so it counted as Denmark.

The other issue was LoTW confirmations sometimes take a while to sync with the DXCC system - usually happens within a day but I've seen it take longer. If you're sure the confirmations are there you might want to contact the DXCC desk directly, they're pretty helpful about sorting these things out.