To get your free FICO Score 2 (often used for mortgage lending), check with major credit card issuers, banks, or credit unions that partner with FICO, such as American Express, Citi, Wells Fargo, or Bank of America. Additionally, a paid Experian premium membership includes access to the FICO Score 2.
FICO® Score Open Access
Over 200 financial institutions provide FICO Scores for free to their customers through the program. If your bank, credit card issuer, auto lender or mortgage servicer is one of them, you can see your FICO® Scores, along with the top factors affecting your scores, for free.
Steps to improve your FICO Score
Signing up for the Experian Premium membership will provide access to your base FICO® Score 8 as well as your FICO® Score 2, FICO® Auto Score 2 and FICO® Bankcard Score 2.
Mortgage lenders typically evaluate a borrower's creditworthiness using FICO Scores 2, 4, and 5. These scores are the ones used by Experian, Equifax and TransUnion — the three major credit bureaus.
Mortgage lenders may choose to use the FICO 2 scoring model instead of FICO 8 for several reasons. Firstly, FICO 2 is specifically tailored for the mortgage industry, making it more customized to assess credit risk in the context of home loans.
Your credit reports are updated when lenders provide new information to the nationwide credit reporting agencies (TransUnion®, Equifax, Experian) for your accounts. Lenders tend to provide updates once a month.
FICO® Score 2 is the classic FICO® Score version available from Experian. FICO® Score 4 is the version of the classic FICO® Score offered by TransUnion. FICO® Score 5 is the Equifax version of the classic FICO® Score.
Avoid Other Sites Offering Free Credit Reports
You might see companies and sites offering free credit reports, but there's only one authorized place to get the free annual credit reports you're entitled to by law: AnnualCreditReport.com.
FICO says a good score falls between 670 and 739. Scores in that range are near or slightly above the U.S. average credit score, which was 715 going into 2026. FICO's highest credit score is 850, and FICO breaks its scores into the following five categories: Exceptional: 800-850.
What actions you can take to boost your credit scores?
You could elevate your credit score with tips such as making on-time payments, paying credit card bills more than once a month, becoming an authorized user and fixing credit report errors.
3. Usage by Lenders: FICO Scores are the standard used by most lenders when making credit decisions, while VantageScore, which Credit Karma uses, is more common for educational and consumer monitoring purposes. 4.
Mortgage companies use FICO 2,4,5. They are always lower than FICO 8 and Vantage scores because they use a different risk evaluation criteria. This is to be expected, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Experian's advantage over FICO is that the information it provides is far more detailed and thorough than a simple number.
Your FICO Score is a specific, widely-used type of credit score, but it's not the only credit score, as other models (like VantageScore) and lender-specific scores exist, though FICO scores are used in over 90% of lending decisions, making them the most important to know for loans and credit cards. Think of "credit score" as the general term for a risk number, and "FICO Score" as a popular brand, like how "soda" is general and "Coca-Cola" is specific.
How to check your FICO Score in 5 different ways
It's partly true: most negative items like late payments and collections are removed from your credit report after about seven years, but the underlying debt often still exists, and bankruptcies (Chapter 7) last 10 years, so your credit isn't entirely "clear" but mostly refreshed from old negatives. The 7-year clock starts from the date of the original delinquency, not when you paid it off or sent to collections, and the debt itself can still be pursued by collectors.
The 3-7-3 Rule in mortgages isn't a loan type but a federal timeline from the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) rule, ensuring borrower protection by mandating disclosures within 3 business days of application, a 7-business-day wait between the initial Loan Estimate and closing, and another 3-day wait if significant changes (like APR) occur, giving borrowers time to review costs before committing to a loan.