A credit score is a number a lender uses to estimate how likely you are to repay. The most widely used family is FICO, whose base scores run from 300 to 850 and are built from five published categories: payment history at 35 per cent, amounts owed at 30, length of credit history at 15, new credit at 10 and credit mix at 10. Two of those five account for 65 per cent of the number.

Do I have one credit score?

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding about the whole system.

You have many. There are multiple scoring models, FICO and VantageScore being the two main families, each with several versions still in use. Each model can be run against data from any of the three major credit bureaus, and the data at each bureau differs because lenders do not all report to all three.

The score a lender sees therefore depends on which model it licenses, which version, and which bureau it pulls. Mortgage lenders commonly use older FICO versions than the one a free app shows you. A number from a consumer app is a real score, calculated by a real model, and it is often not the number that decided your application.

What are the five FICO categories?

FICO publishes the weights, which is unusual and useful.

Payment history, 35 per cent. Whether you have paid credit accounts on time: credit cards, mortgage, student loans, car loans and leases. A single missed payment reported as thirty days late is the most damaging ordinary event available to most people.

Amounts owed, 30 per cent. How much you owe and, more importantly, how much of your available credit you are using. This is utilisation, and it is the fast-moving part of the score.

Length of credit history, 15 per cent. How long accounts have been open, including the age of your oldest account and the average age of all of them.

New credit, 10 per cent. Recently opened accounts and recent applications.

Credit mix, 10 per cent. Whether you have handled both revolving credit, such as cards, and instalment credit, such as loans.

FICO is explicit that these are general. It says the importance of the categories can differ for an individual, and that scores for people who have not been using credit long are calculated differently from those with a longer history.

What is utilisation, and is 30 per cent a rule?

Utilisation is your reported balance divided by your credit limit, both per card and across all cards.

Lower is better, and the widely repeated 30 per cent ceiling is a convention rather than a published threshold. FICO does not state a cliff. What is observable is that the relationship is continuous: moving from 80 per cent to 50 helps, and moving from 50 to 20 helps again.

The mechanical detail that matters is timing. Most issuers report your balance on the statement date, not after you pay. So someone who pays in full every month can still show high utilisation if they spend heavily and the statement cuts before the payment lands. Paying before the statement date, rather than before the due date, is the lever.

Utilisation also has no memory. It is recalculated from the latest reported balance, which is why it is the one component that can move a score within a month or two.

How long does negative information stay on a report?

Set by the Fair Credit Reporting Act rather than by the scoring model.

Most negative items, including late payments, collections and charge-offs, can generally be reported for seven years. A Chapter 7 bankruptcy can be reported for ten years.

Two things follow. Time is a real remedy, and the weight of an old late payment fades well before it drops off. And nobody can lawfully remove accurate negative information early, which is the single clearest test of whether a credit repair offer is legitimate.

Does checking my own credit score hurt it?

No. There are two kinds of inquiry and only one counts.

A soft inquiry is a check that is not part of a credit application: looking at your own score or report, a lender pre-screening you for an offer, or an existing creditor reviewing your account. Soft inquiries do not affect the score.

A hard inquiry comes from an application for credit. These can lower the score slightly and sit in the new credit category, which is 10 per cent of the total.

Rate shopping is handled separately. Scoring models group multiple inquiries for the same type of loan, such as a mortgage or a car loan, within a defined window and count them as one, so comparing offers is not penalised the way opening several credit cards is.

What does a credit score not include?

More than people expect, and the omissions are legally required.

A score does not include your income, your savings, your employment, your age, your race, your religion, your sex, your marital status or your national origin. Lenders may consider income in their own decision, but it is not an input to the score.

Rent, utilities and telecoms payments are historically absent too, because those providers have not generally reported to the bureaus, although some reporting schemes now exist. That absence is why a long record of paying rent on time does very little for a score while a single missed card payment does a lot.

How do I get my reports, and why does it matter?

Free, from the federally authorised source, and the reason is errors.

Federal law entitles you to free copies of your credit reports from the three major bureaus, available through AnnualCreditReport.com, and the bureaus have made weekly access available. Errors are not rare: accounts that are not yours, a balance reported after it was cleared, a limit reported lower than it is, or a duplicate account.

Fixing an error is the only change that can move a score quickly and legitimately. Everything else is slow by design. The same patience applies to the other side of a household balance sheet, where compound interest works in your favour over the same timescales.

Why does the score exist at all, and who sets the cutoffs?

A score is a prediction, not a judgement of character. It is built by fitting historical repayment outcomes to the data on a credit report, and its output is an estimate of the probability of a serious delinquency over a defined horizon.

That design explains features that otherwise look arbitrary. The model cares about utilisation because high utilisation has historically predicted trouble, not because borrowing is disapproved of. It discounts a very old late payment because old information predicts less well than recent information.

The lender, not the score provider, decides what to do with the number. A bank sets its own cutoffs for approval, for pricing and for the credit limit it offers, and two lenders looking at an identical score can reach different decisions because they are lending different products at different margins. The spread a bank earns on that lending is the subject of how banks make money.

This is why there is no universal pass mark. A score is a shared input into decisions that are not shared.

What is a thin file, and how do you get out of one?

A thin file is a credit report with too little history for a model to score, or enough to score badly for reasons that are not about repayment at all.

It is the normal position for young adults, for recent arrivals in a country, and for people who have deliberately avoided credit. Having never borrowed is not read as evidence of reliability, because the model has nothing to work from.

Getting out of it means generating reported history. A secured card, where you post a deposit as the limit, reports like any other card. Becoming an authorised user on an established account can import that account's history on some models. Rent-reporting services exist, with the caveat above that not every model counts them.

The constraint is arithmetic. Length of credit history is 15 per cent of a FICO score and cannot be accelerated, so a thin file resolves in years rather than months.

What actually raises a score, in order of speed?

Fastest: correcting a reporting error, and lowering reported utilisation by paying before the statement date.

Medium: letting the age of recent hard inquiries and recently opened accounts fade, which happens over months.

Slow: building payment history, which is 35 per cent of the score and can only be built by time, and extending the average age of your accounts, which is why closing an old card you no longer use is usually counterproductive.

Not at all: paying a company to dispute accurate information, or carrying a balance to show activity. Neither does what it claims.

This article explains how credit scoring works and is not financial advice. Rules and model versions change, and figures here were verified on 20 October 2026.