Your credit score is a game. Here's the cheat code.
This calculator estimates score movement from the five published FICO factors and their official weightings. Two of them decide roughly two-thirds of your score, which is why almost every worthwhile action sits in the top two rows.
| FICO factor | Weight | What actually moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Payment history | 35% | On-time payments. A single 30-day late mark is the most damaging common event, and it stays on the report for seven years. |
| Amounts owed | 30% | Credit utilisation โ balance against limit, measured per card AND overall. Under 30% avoids the worst drag; the low single digits score best. Zero on every card is slightly worse than a small balance. |
| Length of credit history | 15% | Average age of accounts. This is why closing an old card can hurt even when you never use it. |
| New credit | 10% | Hard inquiries and recently opened accounts. Rate-shopping for one mortgage or car loan inside a short window counts as a single inquiry. |
| Credit mix | 10% | Revolving cards alongside instalment loans. Worth the least, and not worth taking on debt to engineer. |
An estimator built on published weightings gives you direction and rough magnitude โ it cannot reproduce a bureau's proprietary model, and neither can any other tool that is not the bureau. Treat the output as "which action is worth doing first", not as a prediction of your next score. For the underlying data, AnnualCreditReport.com is the only federally authorised source of free reports from all three bureaus. Source: myFICO, "What's in my FICO Scores".
Felix monitors your credit factors and alerts you to opportunities to level up.
Download Richify โ It's FreeDoes not access credit bureau data. Score ranges are estimates. Not financial advice.
More things than most people expect, and the misconceptions cost real money. Your income does not affect your FICO score โ it is not on your credit report at all, which is why a high earner can have a poor score and a modest earner an excellent one.
Nor do your savings or checking balances, your employment status or job title, or your use of a debit card, since none of that is reported to the bureaus. Checking your own score or report is a SOFT inquiry and never affects it, so the common fear of 'looking too often' is unfounded โ only a hard inquiry from an actual credit application counts, and even then it is roughly 10% of the score alongside other new-credit factors.
Finally, federal law under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits scoring on race, colour, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, or receipt of public assistance, and FICO does not use your age. What does affect it is narrower than the folklore: how you have repaid credit, how much you are using, how long you have been doing it, how recently you have applied, and what mix of accounts you hold.
Keep two things separate: your REPORT and your SCORE. AnnualCreditReport.com is the only website federally authorised to provide your free credit reports from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion โ it exists because the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires it, and any other site offering 'free official reports' is not that.
Your report shows the underlying data: accounts, balances, payment history, inquiries. It does not include a score.
For a score, many card issuers and banks now show a free FICO or VantageScore on your statement or in their app. Two cautions worth knowing before you compare numbers.
First, there is no single credit score โ FICO and VantageScore use different models, and lenders often use industry-specific versions, so a 20-40 point spread between sources is normal rather than an error. Second, a simulator like this one estimates DIRECTION and rough magnitude from the published FICO weightings; it cannot reproduce a bureau's proprietary model, and no tool that is not the bureau can.
The fastest ways: 1) Pay down credit card balances to under 10% utilization (30-day impact). 2) Become an authorized user on a family member's old account (30-60 days). 3) Dispute errors on your credit report (30-45 days). 4) Get a credit-builder loan or secured card (3-6 months).
FICO scores are weighted: Payment history (35%), Credit utilization (30%), Length of credit history (15%), Credit mix (10%), New credit inquiries (10%). Focus on the first two โ they account for 65% of your score.
Credit utilization is 30% of your FICO score. Going from 50% to under 10% can boost your score by 40-60 points within a single billing cycle.
The optimal utilization is 1-3% โ not 0%, as zero utilization can actually lower your score slightly.
On a $400,000 30-year mortgage, the difference between a 680 score (7.0% rate) and a 760 score (6.2% rate) is roughly $220/month or $80,000 over the life of the loan. Even a 50-point improvement can save tens of thousands.
Late payments: 7 years. Collections: 7 years from first delinquency.
Bankruptcies: 7-10 years. Hard inquiries: 2 years (but only affect score for ~12 months).
The impact of negative items fades over time.
