Credit Score Calculator

Background.

Nobody outside the scoring companies can calculate your actual credit score. A FICO Score is produced by a proprietary formula applied to the data in one of your three credit reports, at Equifax, Experian or TransUnion, by whichever model version a lender buys, so the same person carries several slightly different scores at once. What is public is the recipe in outline. FICO publishes how much each of five categories counts for the general population: payment history 35 percent, amounts owed 30 percent, length of credit history 15 percent, new credit 10 percent and credit mix 10 percent.

This estimator turns that outline into arithmetic you can see. It starts at 300, the bottom of the FICO scale, and shares out the remaining 550 points in exactly those proportions, so each of your five answers buys a fixed number of points: 1.925 for every percentage point of payments made on time, 1.65 for every point of utilization below 100 percent, 3.3 for each year of credit history up to 25, 5.5 for each hard inquiry fewer than ten, and 11 for each type of credit up to five. A flawless profile reaches 850, the worst possible one stays at 300, and the result is placed in the same five bands, from Poor to Exceptional, that myFICO uses.

The value of a model this plain is that it shows the size of the levers. Cutting utilization from 30 percent to 10 percent is worth 33 points here, as much as ten more years of account age, and you can see why at a glance. The cost is realism. Real scoring is not a sum of fixed prices: one recent late payment can weigh far more than a long record of on-time ones, inquiries fade with time, and balances matter card by card as well as in total. The model also hands a respectable score to someone with no credit history at all, which no lender's model would do.

Read the number as a way to compare scenarios for the same person, not as a prediction of the score a lender will see. Your real score is available from many card issuers and lenders, from myFICO, and from the credit bureaus, and the credit reports behind it are free every week at AnnualCreditReport.com.

What is credit score calculator?

A credit score is a three-digit number that summarizes the information in your credit report to predict how likely you are to repay borrowed money on time. Lenders use it to decide whether to approve an application, what rate to charge and how much credit to extend. FICO's base scores run from 300 to 850, as do the current VantageScore models; FICO's industry versions for auto lending and credit cards run from 250 to 900. A score is built only from what is in the credit report: payments, balances and limits, account ages, applications and account types. Income, savings, employment and the rate you pay are not in it. The estimate here is a five-input linear model weighted to FICO's published category shares, and the score category it returns is a code from 0 for Poor to 4 for Exceptional.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Enter the share of your payments made on time as a whole percentage. Your credit reports list each account's payment record; with no late payments, enter 100.
2. 02Enter your credit utilization: total balances on revolving accounts such as credit cards, divided by their total credit limits, as a percentage. Use the balances on your latest statements, since those are usually what card issuers report.
3. 03Enter the age of your oldest open account in years, then the number of hard inquiries from the last 12 months. Hard inquiries come from applications for credit; checks you make on your own credit, and preapproval offers, are soft inquiries and do not count.
4. 04Enter how many different types of credit you hold, such as credit cards, a car loan, a student loan and a mortgage.
5. 05Read the estimated score and its category code, then change one input at a time to see how far each change moves the estimate.

The formula.

Estimated score = 300 + 1.925 × PH + 1.65 × (100 − CU) + 3.3 × min(H, 25) + 5.5 × max(0, 10 − NI) + 11 × min(CM, 5), rounded to the nearest whole number and kept between 300 and 850. PH is the on-time payment percentage, CU the utilization percentage, H the years of credit history, NI the hard inquiries in the last 12 months and CM the number of credit types.

Each multiplier is a FICO category weight spread over the 550 points between 300 and 850. Payment history, at 35 percent, is worth up to 192.5 points; utilization, standing in for amounts owed at 30 percent, up to 165; history length, at 15 percent, up to 82.5; inquiries, standing in for new credit at 10 percent, up to 55; and credit mix, at 10 percent, up to 55. The caps decide where each input stops mattering: history counts up to 25 years, inquiries stop costing anything beyond ten, and credit mix stops paying after five types. Because the inputs are confined to their ranges, the extremes land exactly on 300 and 850 and the clamp never has to act.

The category code follows the FICO score ranges published by myFICO: 0 for Poor, below 580; 1 for Fair, 580 to 669; 2 for Good, 670 to 739; 3 for Very Good, 740 to 799; and 4 for Exceptional, 800 and above.

What the model leaves out is as important as what it keeps. FICO's models weigh how recent and how severe a late payment was, not just the share of payments made on time; they look at utilization on each card as well as overall; they consider the age of your newest account and the average age of all of them, not only the oldest; and they treat several loan inquiries made while rate shopping within a short window as one. None of that is in a linear sum, which is why the estimate is for comparing scenarios rather than predicting a score.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]CFPB (2023). "What is a credit score?"
2. [2]CFPB (2024). "What is a credit report?"
3. [3]CFPB (2024). "How do I get and keep a good credit score?"
4. [4]myFICO (2024). "What's in my FICO Scores?"
5. [5]FTC (2024). "Free Credit Reports."