Five ingredients, in a fixed order of weight. Once you know the order, most "why did my score drop?" questions answer themselves.
Short version. Pay every account on time, keep card balances under 30% of their limits (under 10% is better), keep your oldest accounts open, apply for new credit rarely, and let time do the rest. Everything below is detail on those five sentences.
FICO publishes its weights; VantageScore describes its factors as "extremely influential" down to "less influential". They agree on the order.
| Factor | FICO weight | What it measures | How fast it moves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payment history | 35% | Late payments, collections, charge-offs, bankruptcies, and how long ago | Slow to heal: a 30-day late stays 7 years, though its weight fades after 2 |
| Amounts owed | 30% | Mostly utilization: card balances divided by card limits, per card and in total | Fast: it is recalculated from the next statement your lender reports |
| Length of history | 15% | Age of your oldest account and the average age of all accounts | Only grows with time; closing old cards shortens it |
| Credit mix | 10% | Having both revolving (cards) and installment (car, student, mortgage) accounts | Small effect; never worth opening a loan just for this |
| New credit | 10% | Hard inquiries in the last 12 months and accounts opened recently | Each inquiry costs a few points for a year, then falls off after two |
A single 30-day late payment on an otherwise clean file can cost 60 to 100 points, and the cleaner the file, the bigger the drop. Collections and charge-offs count as serious negatives even after they are paid, although newer models (FICO 9, VantageScore 3 and 4) ignore paid collections, and medical collections under $500 are no longer reported at all. A bankruptcy stays 7 years (Chapter 13) or 10 years (Chapter 7) from filing, with its weight fading every year.
What helps: bringing any past-due account current first, before anything else. A payment made before the account is reported 30 days late never appears on the report.
Scores look at the balance your card issuer reported on your statement date, not what you owe today. If a $5,000-limit card shows a $3,500 balance, utilization is 70% and the score reads financial stress. Pay it down before the statement closes and the reported number changes next month. Guidelines that hold up across models: total utilization under 30% avoids most of the penalty, under 10% gets most of the bonus, and 1% to 9% on at least one card scores slightly better than 0% everywhere.
Two things that do not help: closing a paid-off card (it removes the limit from the denominator) and moving balances between cards (total utilization stays the same).
The model looks at your oldest open account and the average age of everything. Closed accounts in good standing keep counting for up to 10 years, so closing is not fatal, but a new file with a two-year-old oldest card will not pass 750 no matter how clean it is. This is the factor you cannot buy; you can only avoid damaging it.
A hard inquiry happens when a lender pulls your report for an application. Checking your own report, prequalification tools and employer or landlord checks are soft inquiries and do not affect the score. Several hard inquiries for the same kind of loan within a short window (14 days for older FICO models, 45 for newer ones) count as one, so rate-shopping for a mortgage or car loan is safe.
There is no single score. Each bureau (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) holds a slightly different file, and each model (FICO 8, FICO 9, VantageScore 3.0, industry-specific FICO versions) scores it differently. A 20 to 40 point spread between sources is normal. What matters is the band you are in and the direction of travel.
My Credit shows your score, every account with its utilization, the hard inquiries in the last 12 months and what is helping or hurting, in about a minute and with no effect on the score. Check your credit.