A FICO score is built from five categories of information pulled from your credit reports at Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, each weighted differently: payment history (35%), amounts owed (30%), length of credit history (15%), credit mix (10%), and new credit (10%). What goes into a FICO score is entirely credit-report data — nothing about your income, employment, age, or where you live enters the calculation. Scores run from 300 to 850, and higher means lower risk to the lender.
Payment History (35%)
Whether you’ve paid your bills on time is the single largest input.1myFICO. What’s in Your Credit Score The model looks across credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, student loans, and retail accounts. It doesn’t just flag whether a payment was late. It tracks how late, how recently, and how often. A 90-day delinquency hurts far more than a 30-day one, and a slip from last month weighs heavier than a slip from four years ago.
For someone with a near-perfect record, a single 30-day late payment can drop a score by 100 points or more. The effect is smaller for consumers who already have blemishes, but this factor is where most score damage happens. Collections, charge-offs, and foreclosures all fall under payment history too.
How Long Negative Marks Stick Around
Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, most negative information drops off after seven years, including late payments, collections, and charge-offs.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681c – Requirements Relating to Information Contained in Consumer Reports Bankruptcy is the exception; the statute allows credit bureaus to report it for up to ten years. In practice, the three major bureaus voluntarily remove Chapter 13 filings after seven years from the date the debtor completed the repayment plan, while Chapter 7 filings stay the full ten.
Medical Debt Is Treated Differently
The three major credit bureaus voluntarily agreed in 2022 to stop reporting medical collections that are less than a year old or under $500, and to remove paid medical collections entirely. A CFPB rule finalized in early 2025 would have banned medical debt from credit reports outright, but a federal court vacated it in July 2025.3Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Prohibition on Creditors and Consumer Reporting Agencies Concerning Medical Information (Regulation V) The voluntary bureau restrictions still stand, and fifteen states have passed their own laws limiting medical debt reporting.
Amounts Owed (30%)
The second-heaviest factor measures how much you owe against how much credit you have available.1myFICO. What’s in Your Credit Score The key number is your credit utilization ratio: total revolving balances divided by total credit limits. Carry a $3,000 balance across cards with $10,000 in combined limits and your utilization is 30%. The model checks that ratio on each individual card and across all your revolving accounts together.
Utilization above 30% starts pulling scores down, and the penalty grows as the ratio climbs.4Experian. What Is a Credit Utilization Rate? People with scores above 800 typically keep utilization in the single digits. Somewhat counterintuitively, 0% utilization scores slightly worse than 1%. The model needs some activity to work with.
Unlike a late payment, high utilization has no memory. It only affects your score while it’s being reported. Pay a card down before the statement closes and the ratio resets on the next cycle. This factor also looks at installment loans, comparing what you still owe on a mortgage or car loan to the original balance to see how far you’ve worked the debt down.
Length of Credit History (15%)
Older credit files give the model more data, which generally helps.1myFICO. What’s in Your Credit Score Three time-based numbers feed this category: the age of your oldest account, the age of your newest account, and the average age across all your accounts. The model also considers how long it’s been since you used specific accounts, so a dormant card doesn’t carry the same weight as one you actively manage.
This is why closing old cards can quietly hurt you. A closed account in good standing stays on your report for up to ten years, but once it eventually falls off, your average account age can drop sharply.5TransUnion. How Closing Accounts Can Affect Credit Scores A no-annual-fee card with a clean history is usually worth keeping open and using occasionally.
Credit Mix (10%)
Handling different types of credit successfully earns a modest boost.1myFICO. What’s in Your Credit Score Revolving accounts like credit cards and retail cards work differently than installment accounts like mortgages, auto loans, and student loans, and demonstrating you can manage both is a positive signal. At only 10% of the score, though, it’s not worth taking out a loan you don’t need just to diversify. You’d pay more in interest than you’d gain in points.
Programs like Experian Boost let you voluntarily add on-time payments for utilities, phone bills, rent, insurance, and streaming services to your Experian file.6Experian. What Is Experian Boost? These don’t change the traditional credit mix bucket, but they add positive payment data. The benefit shows up only on FICO scores pulled from Experian; your TransUnion and Equifax scores won’t reflect it.
New Credit (10%)
Opening several accounts in a short period looks risky to the model, especially for consumers without a long credit history.1myFICO. What’s in Your Credit Score Every credit application generates a hard inquiry when the lender pulls your report. Soft inquiries, generated when you check your own credit or a company pre-screens you for an offer, never affect your score.
Rate-Shopping Protection
The model has a built-in allowance for shopping mortgages, auto loans, and student loans. Multiple hard inquiries for the same loan type inside a defined window count as a single inquiry.7Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What Happens When a Mortgage Lender Checks My Credit? The window ranges from 14 to 45 days depending on which FICO version the lender uses.8Experian. How Long Do Hard Inquiries Stay on Your Credit Report? Since you generally can’t know which version, keeping all rate-shopping applications inside a 14-day stretch is the safest bet.
Buy Now, Pay Later
BNPL sits in an awkward spot. Longer monthly BNPL loans are commonly reported to credit bureaus, but the shorter “pay in 4” plans that split a purchase into four biweekly payments usually aren’t. As of early 2026, Affirm is the only major BNPL provider that universally reports all its products, including pay-in-4, to the bureaus. FICO announced in 2025 that newer scoring models would incorporate BNPL data more fully, but the practical impact on scores so far has been modest.
What FICO Scores Leave Out
What the model ignores matters just as much for anyone trying to understand their number. FICO scores do not factor in your income, salary, employer, job title, or employment history. Age, race, religion, sex, marital status, and national origin are excluded by federal law.9myFICO. What’s Not Included in Your Credit Score
A few other exclusions surprise people. Your address doesn’t matter. The interest rates on your accounts don’t matter. Child support obligations aren’t considered. Participation in credit counseling has no direct effect. And checking your own credit, no matter how often, is a soft pull the model ignores entirely.9myFICO. What’s Not Included in Your Credit Score Lenders may weigh things like income when they make their own approval decisions, but those judgments happen outside the FICO calculation.
How the Weights Translate Into Score Ranges
FICO scores run from 300 to 850, sorted into five commonly cited tiers:10FICO. The Perfect Credit Score: Understanding the 850 FICO Score
- Exceptional (800–850): the best rates and terms available; utilization for this group averages around 7%.
- Very good (740–799): qualifies for most premium lending products with near-top pricing.
- Good (670–739): accepted by most lenders, though at higher rates than the top two tiers.
- Fair (580–669): approvals are possible but often carry higher rates or stricter terms; subprime lending typically starts here.
- Poor (300–579): difficult to get approved for unsecured credit; secured cards and credit-builder loans are the usual entry points.
The gap between tiers is real money. On a 30-year mortgage, moving from fair to very good can mean tens of thousands of dollars in interest over the life of the loan.
Which FICO Version Your Lender Uses
There is no single FICO score. FICO has released dozens of versions, and different industries use different ones. The base score runs 300 to 850, but industry-specific models built for auto lending and credit card decisions use a wider 250 to 900 scale and put extra weight on how you’ve handled that specific type of credit.11myFICO. FICO Score Versions
The mortgage market is in transition. Conforming loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have historically required older versions (FICO Score 2, 4, and 5, one per bureau), but the Federal Housing Finance Agency has directed the industry to move to FICO Score 10T and VantageScore 4.0. FICO 10T uses trended data from at least the prior 24 months rather than a snapshot of your latest balances.12Experian. What You Need to Know About the FICO Score 10 Under that model, someone steadily paying down balances scores better than someone whose utilization has been creeping upward, even if both show the same balance today.