A credit score of 770 for a mortgage

Notes

• One reading is not a diagnosis. Credit score moves with payment history and how much of your available credit is in use above all — those two are roughly two thirds of the calculation. A clinician reads it against your history and usually against a repeat, not on its own.
• Reference ranges differ between laboratories. The bands above follow the FICO Score 8 bands. Your own report prints the range its analyser was calibrated against, and that printed range is the one to compare against — a difference of a few units between labs is normal and does not mean either is wrong.
• You do not have one credit score. FICO and VantageScore use different formulas, each of the three bureaux holds slightly different data, and there are numerous model versions in use — mortgage lenders commonly use models two decades old. A score of 770 from a banking app and a score pulled by a lender on the same day can differ by 20 to 50 points without either being wrong.
• The programme matters more than the band name. A conventional loan backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac generally wants 620. An FHA loan allows 580 with 3.5% down, and 500 with 10% down. VA and USDA loans set no minimum at all in the programme rules — individual lenders impose their own, commonly around 620. So the same score can be a decline at one lender and an approval at the next, on the same day.
• Mortgage lenders do not use the score most people have already seen. They pull all three bureaux and use older FICO models — typically FICO 2, 4 and 5 — then take the middle of the three scores. Those models weigh things differently from the FICO 8 or VantageScore shown in a banking app, and the mortgage number is frequently the lower one.
• The score sets the price, not the answer alone. Debt-to-income ratio, the size of the deposit, employment history and the property itself all sit alongside it, and a strong file elsewhere is regularly approved at a score that would fail on its own.
• The two levers that move it fastest are payment history and utilisation. Together they are about two thirds of a FICO score. Utilisation — the share of your available limits currently in use — recalculates every time balances are reported, so paying a card down before the statement date can move a score within a single cycle. Payment history moves slowly in the other direction: a missed payment stays on file for seven years, though its weight fades well before that.
• Closing an old card usually hurts. It removes that limit from the utilisation calculation and, eventually, shortens the average age of accounts. Where an annual fee is the problem, asking the issuer to downgrade the card to a no-fee product in the same family keeps the account and its history intact.