What is a good FICO Score?

FICO groups base scores into five bands: below 580 is Poor, 580 to 669 is Fair, 670 to 739 is Good, 740 to 799 is Very Good, and 800 and above is Exceptional. A good score is generally considered 670 or above, which myFICO describes as near or slightly above the average of US consumers.

Why is my FICO Score different from the score in my banking app?

Because they are usually different models, and often different versions of the same model. FICO says other credit scores calculate your score differently, and that only FICO Scores are used by 90% of top lenders. Even within FICO there are many versions, and each lender chooses which one to use.

Which FICO Score do mortgage lenders use?

For mortgages, lenders typically use FICO Score 2 at Experian, FICO Score 5 at Equifax, and FICO Score 4 at TransUnion. They usually pull a tri-merge report from all three bureaus and take the middle score, or on a joint application, the lower of the two middle scores.

Does a FICO Score work the same way in Canada?

The score bands are different. Equifax Canada says a Canadian credit score is generally between 300 and 900, with 660 to 724 considered good, 725 to 759 very good, and 760 and up excellent. Scores below 560 fall into the poor range and make better loan terms harder to get.

What Is a FICO Score? The Version Your Lender Actually Pulls

You do not have a FICO Score. You have a lot of them, and the one you are looking at on your phone is probably not the one a lender will pull when you apply for something that matters.

That sounds like a technicality until you are sitting across from a mortgage broker whose screen shows a different number than yours. The gap is not an error and it is not your bank hiding something. It is the direct result of how FICO builds and sells its scores, and understanding it is the difference between guessing at your creditworthiness and knowing it.

What a FICO Score actually is

A FICO Score is a three-digit number, ranging from 300 to 850, developed by Fair Isaac Corporation and calculated from the data in your credit report. It estimates how likely you are to repay a loan, which in turn shapes how much you can borrow, over how many months, and at what interest rate.

Its position in the market is the reason it matters more than the alternatives. FICO Scores are used by 90% of top lenders to make credit decisions, and they are calculated from credit reports maintained by the three bureaus, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. The same model run against three different reports gives three different numbers, which is the first reason your score moves depending on where you look.

One boundary is worth stating clearly. Your FICO Score is calculated only from what is in your credit report. Income, job tenure and the type of credit you are applying for are not in the score, even though lenders look at all of them when deciding.

The five ingredients, and what each one weighs

FICO groups credit report data into five categories and publishes the weight of each:

Payment history, 35%. Whether you paid past credit accounts on time. The single largest factor.
Amounts owed, 30%. How much of your available credit you are using. FICO is explicit that owing money is not itself a problem, but using a lot of your available credit can signal that you are overextended.
Length of credit history, 15%. The age of your oldest account, the age of your newest, the average age of all of them, and how long since you used certain accounts.
New credit, 10%. FICO’s research shows that opening several accounts in a short period represents greater risk, especially for people without a long history.
Credit mix, 10%. The blend of cards, retail accounts, installment loans, finance company accounts and mortgages. FICO says it is not necessary to have one of each.

Two caveats attach to those percentages, and both come from FICO itself. The weights describe the general population, not you: for someone who has not been using credit long, the categories are weighted differently. And because your report changes constantly, FICO says it is not possible to measure the exact impact of any single factor without looking at the whole report. Anyone promising you a precise points figure for one action is guessing.

You do not have one FICO Score

This is the part that resolves most confusion, and it is documented on FICO’s own site rather than inferred.

FICO Scores have been in use by lenders since 1989, and the model has been updated repeatedly since. The result is that multiple versions are live in the market at once. FICO Score 8 remains the most widely used version. FICO Score 9 and the FICO Score 10 suite, including FICO Score 10T, are also available to lenders, and each lender decides for itself whether and when to upgrade. Some move quickly. Some never move at all.

The versions genuinely differ. FICO Score 9 stopped counting paid third-party collections, including medical ones, against you, treats unpaid medical collections more gently than other debt, and factors in rental history where it is reported, which helps people with thin files. FICO Score 10T adds trended data, looking at the previous 24 months or longer of balances and limits rather than only the most recent month, so a balance that has been climbing reads differently from one that has been falling.

On top of the base versions sit industry-specific ones, tuned to a product type. These use a different scale entirely: industry-specific FICO Scores range from 250 to 900, against 300 to 850 for base scores. So a number outside the familiar range is not necessarily wrong.

Which score your lender pulls, by product

FICO publishes guidance on which versions matter for which application, and this is the practical core of the whole topic.

Mortgages are the most rigid. Lenders typically use FICO Score 5 at Equifax, FICO Score 4 at TransUnion and FICO Score 2 at Experian. These are older versions, and they are the ones that decide your rate. Mortgage lenders usually pull a tri-merge report covering all three bureaus and take the middle of the three scores. On a joint application, they typically take the lower middle score of the two applicants, which means the stronger borrower cannot carry the weaker one on credit alone.

That single rule reshapes how you should prepare. If you are heading for a refinance and want to know what rate you are actually shopping into, the number to improve is the middle of three older-version scores, not the free score in an app. The same applies to a streamlined product like the VA IRRRL, and to a Canadian refinance, where the underlying bureau data works on a different scale again.

Auto loans typically use FICO Auto Scores, the industry-specific versions built for vehicle financing and used in the majority of auto financing credit evaluations.

Credit cards typically use FICO Bankcard Scores, or FICO Score 8 or 9. If the card balance itself is the thing under pressure, the score follows the debt rather than the other way round, which is why a real payoff strategy does more for the number than any amount of score monitoring.

Everything else, including personal loans, student loans and retail credit, most often runs on FICO Score 8.

FICO vs VantageScore: why the free number rarely matches

The score your banking app or card issuer shows you for free is frequently not a FICO Score at all. It is often VantageScore, a competing model, or it is a FICO version other than the one your lender will use.

FICO’s own framing of this is direct: other credit scores calculate your score differently, so while they may seem similar to a FICO Score, they are not, and only FICO Scores are used by 90% of top lenders. myFICO’s advice for anyone choosing a monitoring service is to look for actual FICO Scores rather than alternative scores for exactly this reason.

None of that makes a free score useless. As a direction-of-travel indicator it is fine, because the same underlying behaviour drives every model: pay on time, keep utilisation low, do not open a pile of new accounts at once. It is unreliable as a threshold check. Deciding you are ready to apply because a free score crossed 700 is a mistake when the version your lender pulls could land somewhere else entirely.

There is a second reason the numbers diverge that has nothing to do with models. Not every lender reports to all three bureaus, reporting timelines differ, and an error or a hard inquiry may appear on only one report. Different input, different output, before any scoring model is even chosen. The rest of our credit score guides work through what actually moves those inputs.

What counts as good, in the US and in Canada

FICO groups base scores into five bands, and describes each relative to the average US consumer:

Below 580, Poor. Well below average, and reads to lenders as a risky borrower.
580 to 669, Fair. Below average, though many lenders will still approve loans in this range.
670 to 739, Good. Near or slightly above the US average, and considered a good score by most lenders.
740 to 799, Very Good. Above average, and reads as dependable.
800 and above, Exceptional. Well above average, and an exceptionally low risk.

FICO adds that there is no single minimum score required by all lenders. Each one sets its own criteria based on risk tolerance, loan type, income, debt and history.

Canada runs on a different scale, so importing the US bands will mislead you. Equifax Canada says a Canadian credit score is generally between 300 and 900. Scores from 660 to 724 are considered good, 725 to 759 very good, and 760 and up excellent. Lenders generally treat 660 and above as acceptable or lower risk, while scores below 560 fall into the poor range where better loan terms become hard to get. A 700 means something quite different on each side of the border.

What to do with any of this

Find out which score your next application will use, then work on that one. If a mortgage is the goal, the target is the middle of three older-version bureau scores, and the lever is the report data underneath them rather than the app on your phone.

Then work the weights in order. Payment history and amounts owed are 65% of a FICO Score between them, and every other category combined is the remaining 35%. On-time payments and lower utilisation are not the boring advice; they are the arithmetic. If you are starting from a thin file rather than a damaged one, the fastest legitimate routes to a usable score run through exactly those two categories.

And check all three bureau reports, not one. Since scores are calculated from whichever report a lender pulls, an error sitting on a single bureau’s file can quietly cost you a rate tier on a product where only that bureau’s version counts. Repairing and rebuilding a damaged file is a slower project than fixing an error, and worth separating from it.