The 5 Things That Move Your Credit Score, By Weight

I did not look at my credit score until I was 29, and when I finally did I got it wrong in the other direction. I assumed it was mostly about income, because income is what a lender cares about.

My income is not on my credit report.

Not one line of it. The report holds accounts, balances, credit limits, the date of every payment, applications for new credit, and a short list of public records. That is the entire raw material.

A credit score is a model run over that file, turning a few years of behaviour into three digits. The most widely used family of models publishes how much each input counts, which is unusually generous of them and worth reading.

The five inputs, and what each is worth

Two inputs make 65 per cent of the number. The other three share the remaining 35 per cent between them, and one of those three is almost entirely outside your control in any given year.

Knowing the order changes what you bother doing. Most of the credit advice floating around is about the bottom three.

Payment history, 35 per cent

Whether you paid, and whether you paid on time. It is the largest input by a wide margin and the only one where a single event can do real damage.

The threshold that matters is 30 days. Paying on day 12 past the due date costs you a late fee and possibly a bad mood, but it does not get reported to the bureaus. Paying on day 31 puts a mark on your file that sits there for seven years.

Seven years is not a typo and it is not negotiable. The mark fades in influence as it ages, but the date it falls off is fixed by law rather than by how sorry you are.

So automate the minimum on everything you owe, today, and pay the real amount by hand afterwards. The minimum on a $6,400 card balance might be $160, and $160 leaving your account automatically is what stands between you and a seven year mark on the month you are travelling and distracted.

Autopay the minimum. Never autopay nothing.

Amounts owed, 30 per cent

Almost all of this is utilisation, which is your balance divided by your credit limit. Carry $3,000 on a card with a $10,000 limit and your utilisation on that card is 30 per cent, because 3,000 divided by 10,000 is 0.30.

Pay that balance down to $900 and you are at 9 per cent. Same card, same limit, one statement cycle.

Both the per card figure and the total across all cards count. Say you hold three cards with a $5,000 limit each, $15,000 of limit in total, and you are carrying $4,500 on one of them and nothing on the other two. Your overall utilisation is 30 per cent, which looks tidy, while the card itself is at 90 per cent, which does not.

There is a timing trap here that costs people points for no reason. The balance reported to the bureaus is usually your statement balance, the figure on the day the statement closes, not the zero you leave behind after you pay it. Someone who spends $4,000 a month and clears it in full every month can still report 80 per cent utilisation on a $5,000 limit.

The fix is to make a payment before the statement closing date rather than only before the due date. Find the closing date in the app, pay most of the balance a few days earlier, and the number that gets reported is the smaller one.

Utilisation has no memory. Last month's 70 per cent does not haunt you once this month reports at 9 per cent, which makes this the one input you can fix in weeks rather than years.

Length of credit history, 15 per cent

Two things: the age of your oldest account, and the average age across all of them. Both reward you for having done nothing at all for a long time.

Suppose you opened cards in 2009, 2018 and 2024. As of 2026 those accounts are 17, 8 and 2 years old, so the average age is 9 years, because 17 plus 8 plus 2 is 27 and 27 divided by 3 is 9.

Close the 2009 card and the average of what remains is 5 years. You gave up four years of history to stop carrying a piece of plastic you were not using anyway.

Closed accounts in good standing do linger on the report for a while, so the damage arrives late rather than immediately, which is worse in a way because you will have forgotten what caused it.

Do not close your oldest card. If it has an annual fee you resent, call and ask whether the issuer will downgrade it to a no fee card on the same account number, which keeps the open date intact.

New credit, 10 per cent

Applications. A hard inquiry is a lender pulling your file because you asked them for money, and it stays visible for about two years while counting against you for about one.

A soft inquiry is you checking your own score, or a company screening you for a preapproved offer you did not ask for. Soft inquiries do nothing at all, which means checking your own score is free and you should do it.

Shopping for a mortgage or a car loan is treated differently, because the models know you are pricing one loan rather than opening six. Multiple inquiries of the same type inside a short window count as one, and the window runs somewhere between 14 and 45 days depending on which model version the lender uses. Do your rate shopping in one concentrated stretch and it costs you a single inquiry.

New accounts hit you twice, incidentally, because opening one also drags down the average age from the section above. A new card is a small dent in two places at once.

Credit mix, 10 per cent

Whether you have handled both revolving credit, meaning cards where the balance moves around, and instalment credit, meaning fixed loans like a car loan or a mortgage that pay down on a schedule.

It is ten per cent of the score and it fills in on its own over a normal financial life.

Do not take out a loan you do not need to improve a category worth a tenth of the number. The interest will cost you more than the points are worth, every single time.

What is not on the report at all

Your salary. Your savings balance. Your checking account. Your debit card spending, which runs on your own money and therefore tells a lender nothing about whether you repay. Your job, your employer, your marital status, and your rent unless your landlord specifically reports it or you use a service that does.

People spend real energy on these. A lender may well ask for your income on an application, because they care about it, but it is not an input to the score itself and no amount of it will move the number.

Read the file, not just the score

The score is a summary of a document, and the document sometimes has errors in it. An account that is not yours, a balance you cleared two years ago still showing as open, a late mark on a month you can prove you paid.

You are entitled to your report from each of the three bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, and it is worth reading all three because lenders do not report to every bureau uniformly. A file that looks clean at one can carry a mark at another.

Disputing an item is free and done online. It takes about ten minutes per entry, and the bureau is obliged to investigate and come back to you.

Do this before you apply for anything large rather than after. An underwriter finding the error during a mortgage application is a six week delay. You finding the same error four months earlier is an afternoon.

What that leaves you doing

Automate the minimums, because 35 per cent of the score turns on never missing one. Then watch utilisation, because 30 per cent of the score turns on a figure you can change this month. Everything else is a rounding error you will fix by simply not doing anything stupid for a few years.

Open whichever card carries your largest balance and divide that balance by the limit. If the answer is north of 30 per cent, you have found the fastest moving number on your entire report, and the only question left is how to pay it down when you owe on four other things at the same time.