Credit Score

Reviewed 11 August 2026 · Sourced from the CFPB, FICO, the FTC and the Fair Credit Reporting Act

What the number is actually measuring

A landlord runs your name. A car dealer runs your name. Both get back a number between 300 and 850, and nothing says where it came from.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau defines a credit score as “a prediction of your credit behavior, such as how likely you are to pay a loan back on time.” That is the whole job. It does not know your income or your savings. It reads what you have already borrowed and repaid, and forecasts the next loan.

The scale is common, not universal: the CFPB puts it as “many scores range from 300 to 850, but different companies use different ranges,” and FICO's auto and bankcard versions run broader. VantageScore uses the same span.

You also do not have a score. Three nationwide bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — hold three separate files, and the CFPB gives three reasons you end up with several: different lenders use different scores, there are many formulas, and information comes from different reporting sources. The free number in your banking app is real, just not necessarily the one that declined you.

The five things it is built from

The score is not a judgment call. It is a model, and FICO — which writes the most widely used one — publishes what goes in and what it weighs.

Those are the five weights taught in Stage 1 · Survive, straight from FICO. One caveat FICO prints beside them: “The percentages shown are for the general population and may be different for different credit profiles.” They describe the model in aggregate, not a lever that works identically on every file.

What survives the caveat is the shape: payment history and amounts owed are 65% of the score between them, and both answer to what you do this month. Length of history answers only to time.

What counts as a good score

Fair Isaac publishes the tiers on its own consumer site, so these are the model author's labels.

670 is where good starts, which is why it is the threshold in Stage 3 · Rebuild for looking at a no-annual-fee cash back card. The bands are labels, not switches. Every lender sets its own cutoffs.

What one missed payment really costs

You were thirty days late once, and somebody told you it cost fifty points. Or a hundred. Nobody publishes that number, including the company that owns the model.

FICO's blog on how credit actions affect scores declines to give standardized drops, stating that “the impact to FICO Score of a given credit action is highly dependent on the starting credit profile of the consumer.” myFICO supplies the other half: “A few late payments are not an automatic score-killer. An overall good credit history can outweigh one or two instances of late credit card payments.”

What holds up is the shape. A missed payment is the most damaging ordinary credit event, because payment history is the heaviest factor at 35%, and the more score you have, the more there is to take. Any fixed figure attached to it is an estimate, not FICO's number. Which is why the action never changes: pay something by the due date, even the minimum.

How much of your limit you are using

Amounts owed is 30% of the score, and the part you can move fastest is utilization — your revolving balances as a share of your limits. A $300 balance on a $1,000 limit is 30%.

The sourced target is the CFPB's: “Experts advise keeping your use of credit at no more than 30 percent of your total credit limit.” Lower is better, and that is where the sourcing stops. The familiar “under 10% is ideal” line is a widely repeated convention, not a published threshold — no federal source or model author sets a number below 30.

Two mechanics catch people. Utilization is measured on the balance your issuer reports, usually the statement balance, so paying in full after the statement cuts your interest but not the figure the bureau sees. And closing an unused old card removes its limit from the denominator, pushing utilization up without you spending anything. Check yours with the credit utilization calculator.

What happens when you apply for credit

Applying for credit creates a hard inquiry, and fear of them stops people shopping around — which costs far more than the inquiries do. FICO publishes the sizes.

• For most people, one additional inquiry takes less than five points off their FICO Scores.
• An inquiry stays on the report up to two years, but only affects the score for one.
• Rate shopping is deduplicated. Inquiries for the same kind of loan count as one inside any 14-day span in older FICO versions, or any 45-day span in newer ones.
• Mortgage, auto and student loan inquiries made in the 30 days before scoring are ignored.

So five applications for five cards in a week is five inquiries. Five mortgage quotes in a week is one. The model was built for comparing prices on one loan.

Your report, your errors, and the 30-day clock

The score is computed from the report, so an error in the report is an error in the score. In the FTC's 2013 study, one in five consumers had an error on at least one of their three reports, and one in twenty had an error serious enough to cost them worse terms on a loan or insurance.

The reports cost nothing. FCRA § 1681j(a)(1)(A) guarantees one free disclosure from each bureau every 12 months; weekly access is real, but it is a program the bureaus permanently extended themselves, not a statutory right. The FTC says AnnualCreditReport.com is the only authorized site.

Dispute something and the bureau has 30 days to reinvestigate under § 1681i(a)(1). That number is incomplete: the same section allows 15 more days if you send relevant information during the original window, so the outside limit is 45. Send documents with the dispute, not after.

How long the bad marks actually stay

Nothing on a report is permanent, and the expiry dates come from statute.

Collections and charge-offs: about seven years. § 1681c(a)(4) keeps collection accounts off a report once they are more than seven years old, and § 1681c(c)(1) starts that clock 180 days after the delinquency began — so about seven and a half years from the original miss.

Bankruptcy: ten years, whichever chapter. § 1681c(a)(1) sets one ten-year limit for all cases under title 11, with no distinction between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. The seven-year removal of a completed Chapter 13 is bureau policy, applied voluntarily — a courtesy, not a right you could enforce.

Medical debt: bureau policy, not federal law. The three bureaus voluntarily removed paid medical collections and unpaid ones under $500 as of 11 April 2023, and wait a year from the date of service before reporting it. The CFPB rule that would have made that law was vacated by a federal district court on 11 July 2025. An unpaid collection over $500 and over a year old can still appear.

One thing you can switch off directly: prescreened offers, free for five years at optoutprescreen.com. That matters most right after a bankruptcy, when your file is the list predatory lenders buy.

What trips people up

• Treating the app score as the lender's score. A different number is not a wrong one.
• Repeating a fixed points figure for a late payment. FICO does not publish one.
• Closing an old card to tidy up. It removes that limit from your utilization denominator and shortens your history.
• Paying someone to remove accurate information. It cannot be done legally, and charging before the work is done is prohibited.
• Waiting for a mark to age off before acting. Recent activity outweighs old damage.

The figures on this page are checked against the source that publishes them, and dated. Published rates move after the release named above — the linked source always carries the current number. This page explains a term; it does not recommend a product.