I was at the kitchen table sorting the June statement when my husband asked me, point blank: “So is 740 good?”
I had to look it up. And then I found the answer I’d been hoping for all along — the one I could actually pin to the wall in our binder.
It’s a three-digit number that decides whether you get the loan, the apartment, the card — and at what rate. It can quietly add thousands of dollars in interest over the life of a loan, or shave it off. The question I keep getting: where does “good” actually start?
Here’s the number, and it’s lower than you think
In most scoring models, a good credit score is anything above 670. The full ladder, in most models:
300 to 579 — very poor. 580 to 669 — fair. 670 to 739 — good. 740 to 799 — very good. 800 to 850 — exceptional.
So the answer to my husband’s question: 740 is the start of “very good,” not a mystery threshold. It’s the difference between qualifying and getting the better deal.
There isn’t one score — here’s what you’re actually looking at
“Your credit score” is shorthand. You have a credit history, and lots of companies run their own math on it. The two you’ll meet in real life:
FICO. The oldest, from 1958, and it’s what about 90% of lenders still rely on. Good is 670 to 739, very good is 740 to 799, and 800+ is exceptional. Many banks give you your FICO score for free if you’re a customer, and myFICO myFICO sells it with credit monitoring attached.
VantageScore. Built by the three big credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax, TransUnion — back in 2006 as a FICO rival. It moved to the familiar 300 to 850 scale in 2013, and the current version (VantageScore 4.0) weights things differently: medical debt counts for less, and utilization is read as a trend instead of a single snapshot. This is the score you see on Credit Karma Credit Karma. Under it, “good” runs 661 to 780, and 781 to 850 is excellent.
A few industries — mortgage lenders, auto dealers — have run their own models in the past. Since the late 1980s, most (insurance being the holdout) have standardized on FICO. If you ever apply somewhere and get a number between 250 and 900, ask which model they used before you read into it.
Lenders mostly want 670 or higher. Some lenders will approve you as low as 620, and the premium-tier products want 740+. Below 620 is “subprime,” where unsecured credit gets hard to come by — though government-backed options like FHA mortgages or USDA loans can go as low as 580.
Where this number actually touches your money
The score shows up at almost every big financial moment, and the interest-rate math is where it gets personal:
- Mortgages and loans. Rate and loan amount both follow your score. Rates might only differ by a few percentage points — but over the life of a mortgage, that’s thousands of dollars either way.
- Credit cards. Card rates vary wildly, by 10% or 20%. If you ever carry a balance, a lower rate saves you hundreds of dollars a month.
- Bank accounts. Banks do a soft check, and your score doesn’t usually matter — what they look for is a history of overdrawing accounts and walking away (that’s what ChexSystems flags).
- Rent. Leasing companies care about payment history more than the number itself, but a low score is a yellow flag they read as “might be trouble getting approved.”
Seven moves that actually move the score
Here’s the thing my planner and I came back to: the score is built from behavior, so the behavior is the whole game. Five factors do the work, in this order:
Payment history — 35%. Credit utilization — 30%. Credit age — 15%. Credit mix — 10%. New credit — 10%.
That ordering is the roadmap. The fastest wins, in order of how much they bite:
- Pay everything on time — every time. Late payments are the single biggest red flag. Keep it up even on debt already in collections. No debt accounts yet? A free service like Experian Boost adds your utility and phone payments to your credit report so they count.
- Don’t max out what you have. Lower utilization is better — keep it under 30% of your total available credit, and 0% is ideal. And here’s the shortcut: raising a credit limit (or opening one more card) instantly lowers your utilization without spending a cent more.
- Keep the old cards open. Credit age compounds quietly. Cancel the cards with annual fees, or the ones you can’t resist maxing out — but leave the rest alive and just cut the plastic up.
- Space out new applications. Every hard inquiry is a small ding. Opening five cards in a few weeks for sign-up bonuses (worth several hundred dollars each, sure) means your score is worse by the fifth one — which means worse rates on top. Same deal before a mortgage: leave a couple of months of quiet time so the score recovers.
- Watch it, and dispute errors fast. A free tool like Capital One’s CreditWise tells you when anything on your report changes, so you can fix errors before they cost you a rate.
Building from zero? Two doors most people skip: a secured card (a deposit becomes your limit — pay it down, and the limit can grow), and becoming an authorized user on someone’s well-managed card, which puts their good history on your report even if you never swipe it. And credit-builder loans — the lender locks away a small amount, around $500 to $1,000, you repay it with interest over a year or two, and the on-time payments are what’s really for sale.
What your score will never count
This is the part that surprises people. Your score has no idea — and can’t have an idea — about:
- Your race, religion, or marital status (the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act says lenders can’t use these, so models don’t).
- Your age, or whether you get public assistance.
- Your income or net worth. (Lenders still ask — income is a huge part of whether you can repay — it just isn’t in the score itself.)
- Your job or where you live in the U.S.
- Soft checks and score checks. Pulling your free annual report from AnnualCreditReport.com or checking your score on Credit Karma touches nothing. Only asking for new credit leaves a mark.
- Your rent payments — yet. That’s the one I keep an eye on: FICO is working on banking activity and rent, which would finally let the people who always paid rent on time build a track record.
So what do I do on a Tuesday evening? I pull my score, note the two numbers that move it fastest — on-time payments and utilization — and I don’t check the other three for a month. Slow, boring, and it’s exactly how the number goes up.
Here’s your move for today: pull your free report once. You don’t need a subscription or a tool for that — you just need to know where the 670 line sits, and which side of it you’re on.