Who owns your credit score?

On Monday evening, 28 September, the head of the US housing-finance regulator posted a few lines on X about “pricing grids”. By Tuesday’s close, Fair Isaac, the company behind the FICO score, had lost 26.5% of its value, closing at $617.87.¹² Roughly $4 billion of market value disappeared in a day, on top of a slide that has taken the shares down about 62% since January.³⁴

A pricing grid sounds like plumbing. It is in fact the mechanism that turns a three-digit number into the fees an American family pays on its mortgage, and for thirty years only one company’s number counted. This piece follows the money behind that number, asks whether the change will help borrowers, and then crosses the Atlantic: France decided long ago that it did not want a credit score at all, and on 20 November new European rules change how every lender here has to judge you.

A price war, not a better scoreIn brief

Washington is using competition to break FICO’s pricing power, which had pushed the cost of a mortgage credit score from about 60 cents to $10 in five years. American borrowers may pay less, some of them a lot less. But the challenger belongs to the three credit bureaus, and nobody in charge has claimed the new score predicts defaults better. In France there is no score to fight over: lenders check a negative register and your income, and from 20 November they must also explain automated decisions and offer a human review.

How a number became a toll

A credit scoreCredit scoreA number produced by a statistical model that estimates how likely a person is to fall seriously behind on a debt. FICO and VantageScore dominate in the US; France has no national score.Read in the glossary → is a model’s estimate of how likely you are to fall seriously behind on a debt. In the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored companies that buy most mortgages, required lenders to use one particular version of FICO for decades. Every mortgage application therefore paid FICO a royalty, usually three times, because lenders pull a report and a score from each of the three bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, in what the industry calls a tri-mergeTri-mergeThe US mortgage practice of pulling a credit report and score from all three bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, and merging them into one file.Read in the glossary →.

For most of that time the royalty was small. It was 50 to 60 cents per score in 2018. Then FICO started raising it: a tiered price of up to $2.75 in 2023, $3.50 in 2024, $4.95 in 2025, and for 2026 either $10 per score or $4.95 plus a $33 fee on every loan that closes.⁵⁶

What FICO charges per mortgage credit score

Wholesale price per score, in dollars. Lenders usually pull three. 2023 shows the top of a tiered price; 2026 is the per-score option.

FICO argues that its share is modest and that the bureaus and resellers who package the scores take most of the bill. It says any increase above $1.45 per score is “solely due to prices set by others who sell and distribute the scores”.⁷ The California Housing Lenders Association puts the total credit-report cost of a mortgage at about $540 in 2026, up from about $50 in 2022, and FICO’s cut of the base price at $30. FICO’s reply was to ask “where the remaining $510 is allocated among the three credit bureaus”.⁸

Where a $540 credit report bill goes

Estimated credit report cost of one US mortgage in 2026. FICO disputes the total and asks where the rest goes.

Both sides have a point, and the numbers explain why Washington acted anyway. In the quarter to March 2026, FICO’s revenue from mortgage originations more than doubled, up 127%, while the number of mortgages barely moved. Its scores division runs at a 91% operating margin, and mortgage originations now make up 62% of its score revenue.⁹¹⁰ Senator Josh Hawley wrote to the company in March that the price had gone “from $0.60 to $10 per score over five years”.¹¹

Eighteen months of pressure

The regulator’s first move came in July 2025, when the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, allowed lenders to use VantageScore 4.0 instead of FICO.¹² FICO’s answer, in October 2025, was to let resellers calculate its scores directly, cutting the bureaus out, with the $10 or “$4.95 plus $33” pricing. Equifax called it “another example of FICO flexing its monopoly pricing power”.⁶¹³

The bureaus then did something unusual: they cut the price of their own score to almost nothing. TransUnion charges 99 cents for a VantageScore mortgage score and has promised to keep that price until the end of 2028. Equifax charges $1 until the end of 2027.¹⁴¹⁵ The practical rollout began on 1 May 2026 with about 50 lenders, was opened to all lenders in early September, and on 28 September the regulator announced a single pricing grid.¹⁶²

Eighteen months that broke a monopoly

Moves by Washington, FICO and the credit bureaus. Hover or tap each point for the detail.

Why the single grid matters

Fannie and Freddie charge borrowers upfront fees called loan-level price adjustmentsLoan-level price adjustment (LLPA)An upfront fee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac charge on a mortgage, set by the borrower’s credit score bucket and the size of the deposit.Read in the glossary →, set by two things: your credit score bucket and the size of your deposit. Until now, a VantageScore had to be 20 points higher than a FICO to land in the same bucket. A 700 FICO and a 720 VantageScore paid the same fee.¹⁷

That offset mattered. The actuarial firm Milliman tested ten years of loans and found that, with the 20-point handicap, VantageScore gave the borrower a lower fee in about a quarter of cases and a higher one in about 40%.¹⁷

The old handicap: VantageScore against FICO

Share of loans where using VantageScore, 20 points handicapped, gave the borrower a lower, equal or higher fee than FICO. The single grid removes the handicap.

Remove the handicap and the arithmetic flips. VantageScores run on average about 9 points above FICO for the same borrowers, according to Santander’s analysts.¹⁸ The average borrower now scores slightly better on VantageScore, and some will land in a cheaper bucket. Rocket Mortgage, the largest US lender, announced the same day that VantageScore will become its default on eligible loans, and said its clients who saved money with it this year paid on average $1,600 less at closing.¹⁹ TD Cowen’s Jaret Seiberg called the change “effectively an across the board cut in loan level pricing adjustments”.¹

No start date and no new fee table have been published yet.²

Who owns the challenger

VantageScore is a joint venture owned by Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.²⁰ The same three companies hold the credit files, distribute FICO’s scores, and now sell a rival score below cost. FICO’s head of scores has argued that “true competition cannot exist when the bureaus are vertically integrated into scoring”.²¹ Equifax’s chief executive, for his part, says his company makes no margin on reselling FICO mortgage scores, which are about half its US mortgage revenue.¹⁵

The regulator does not seem to trust the bureaus either. In the same week he opened VantageScore to every lender, the FHFA director accused Equifax, Experian and TransUnion of “overcharging Americans for far too long” and said he was studying replacing the three reports with two, or even one.²²

Then there is the question nobody in charge has answered: is the new score better at predicting who will default? Seiberg noted that the agency “has not explained why it now views FICO and Vantage Scores as the same” and that “this is not about which model is more predictive of defaults”.¹ When lenders can pick whichever score is higher, analysts at RBC and Milliman warn of “score shopping” and adverse selection: the fee a borrower pays drifts away from the risk they represent, and the losses land on Fannie and Freddie, which is to say on taxpayers.¹¹⁷

For borrowers the practical advice is short. Ask your lender which score it uses, and get a second quote from a lender that uses the other one. The 33 million extra Americans that VantageScore says it can score are real people with thin files, but the official figure for adults with no score at all is 25 million, of whom 7 million have no credit record.²⁰²³

France chose not to have a score

Nothing like this can happen in France, because there is no national credit score to own. What exists is a negative register: the FICPFICPFrance’s national register of credit repayment incidents, run by the Banque de France. It lists people who missed repayments or are in an over-indebtedness procedure; it holds no positive data.Read in the glossary →, run by the Banque de France since 1989, lists people who have missed repayments or entered an over-indebtedness procedure. More than 2.27 million people were on it at the end of 2025.²⁴ You can check your own entry for free, online, at a branch or by post.²⁵

France came close to adding a positive register, a file of every consumer loan held by every borrower, like the credit files behind American scores. The 2014 consumer law created one. The Constitutional Council struck it down the same month, finding that a register holding “precise and detailed data relating to a large number of people”, consulted “on very many occasions”, was an intrusion on privacy “that cannot be regarded as proportionate to the aim pursued”.²⁶ The debt-advice charity Crésus still campaigns for it; no bill has been tabled since.²⁷

French lenders therefore judge you with their own internal scoring, the FICP and one blunt rule. For mortgages, the financial stability council (HCSF) caps repayments at 35% of income and loan terms at 25 years, with a 20% margin for exceptions. It kept all three limits at its 15 September meeting. In June the average French mortgage used 30.9% of income over 22.7 years.²⁸ Where an American lender prices risk borrower by borrower through a score, a French lender mostly rations credit through your income.

Germany shows the other risk

Germany has a private score, Schufa, and a record of fights over it. In December 2023 the EU Court of Justice ruled that a Schufa score can count as an “automated individual decision” under the GDPR when banks lean heavily on it, which triggers the right to a human review.²⁹ Schufa responded with a new score in March 2026 based on 12 criteria instead of up to 250, on a scale of 100 to 999, which people can see for free.³⁰

Four months later, German public broadcasters revealed that Schufa kept a separate database of old records on millions of people. The Hesse data protection authority said “a permanent storage of such historical data in reserve for indefinite future purposes is not permissible”.³¹ A private score, even a transparent one, creates a file that has to be policed.

Sources for the table: FHFA; FCA; Schufa; Banque de France; HCSF.^1632302428

What changes in France on 20 November

The EU’s revised Consumer Credit DirectiveConsumer Credit Directive (CCD2)The revised EU directive on consumer credit, applicable from 20 November 2026. It tightens creditworthiness checks, brings buy-now-pay-later into scope and gives a right to human review of automated decisions.Read in the glossary → applies from 20 November 2026. France transposed it by an ordinance in September 2025, followed by implementing decrees in February and August 2026.³³³⁴ For anyone applying for consumer credit here, four things change:

• The FICP becomes compulsory but not sufficient. Lenders must consult it, but may not base their decision on it “exclusively”.³³
• You get a human. When the assessment is automated, you can ask for human interventionAutomated decisionA decision with significant effects taken solely by an algorithm. The GDPR gives people the right to human intervention and an explanation, and the EU court has held that a credit score can count as one.Read in the glossary →, an explanation and a review.³³
• Some data is off limits. Social networks are not a relevant source, and sensitive data such as health may not be used.³³
• Buy now, pay later enters the rules. Most split-payment offers now count as credit, with lighter checks only for fee-free schedules under three months and amounts under €200.³⁵

The wider EU rules on artificial intelligence classify credit scoring as a high-risk use, with obligations on testing and oversight. Those were due in August 2026 and have been postponed to 2 December 2027.³⁶

A number worth fighting over

The FICO crash is a story about price, not accuracy. Washington decided that one company had too much power over a fee paid on every mortgage and used the only lever it had: letting a rival in and pricing both the same. That should lower costs for many American borrowers. It also hands more influence to the three bureaus the regulator itself calls overpriced, and it has not been shown to measure risk any better.

France settled the underlying question in 2014 by refusing to build the file that scores depend on. The price is cruder lending rules, a hard 35% cap that some banks say shuts out solvent buyers. The gain is that nobody owns a number about you that you cannot see. From 20 November, the rules in France add something the American system still lacks by default: the right to ask a person why.

Sources

All links accessed 30 September 2026.

Footnotes

1. Investing.com via Yahoo Finance, “FICO stock drops 20%: analysts break down the impact of FHFA’s single pricing grid”, 29 September 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. HousingWire, “FHFA: Fannie and Freddie move to one pricing grid”, 29 September 2026; Bloomberg Law, “Pulte says Fannie, Freddie are moving to single pricing grid”, 28 September 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Protos, “Bill Pulte’s tweet cost FICO shareholders $4 billion”, 29 September 2026. ↩

4. Barchart via Yahoo Finance, “FICO stock plunges 26%”, 29 September 2026. ↩

5. HousingWire, “It’s official: FICO raises score price for mortgage firms to $4.95”, 6 November 2024. ↩

6. FICO, “FICO launches Mortgage Direct License Program”, 1 October 2025. ↩ ↩²

7. FICO, “FICO’s royalty pricing, role and adoption in the mortgage industry”, 6 November 2024. ↩

8. HousingWire, “Mortgage credit report costs jump”, 1 April 2026. ↩

9. Investing.com, “FICO Q2 FY2026 slides: mortgage scores drive 39% revenue surge”, 28 April 2026. ↩

10. Fair Isaac, Q3 fiscal 2026 results, 29 July 2026; Yahoo Finance, “Fair Isaac Q3 earnings call”, 30 July 2026. ↩

11. HousingWire, “Hawley presses FICO on mortgage pricing”, 24 March 2026. ↩

12. Brownstein, “FHFA reverses course on bi-merge, opens door to VantageScore 4.0”, 23 July 2025. ↩

13. Equifax, “Statement on FICO 2x price increase for 2026”, 2 October 2025. ↩

14. TransUnion, “TransUnion extends 99-cent mortgage pricing for VantageScore 4.0 through the end of 2028”, 29 September 2026. ↩

15. HousingWire, “Equifax sets $1 VantageScore price through 2027”, 21 July 2026. ↩ ↩²

16. Federal Housing Finance Agency, Credit scores; The MortgagePoint, “Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac instructed to accept VantageScore for all lenders”, 4 September 2026. ↩ ↩²

17. HousingWire, “How the VantageScore and FICO pricing grids compare”, 10 September 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

18. Santander US Capital Markets, “VantageScore should have little effect on MBS valuation”, 11 September 2026. ↩

19. Rocket Mortgage, “Rocket Mortgage becomes first home lender to use VantageScore as its preferred scoring model”, 28 September 2026. ↩

20. VantageScore, “VantageScore 4.0 now FHFA approved for all lenders”, 4 September 2026. ↩ ↩²

21. FICO, “The path forward for fair credit scoring competition”, 29 September 2025. ↩

22. HousingWire, “Pulte weighs bi-merge credit reports”, 4 September 2026. ↩

23. American Banker, “Credit invisibility is half the problem we thought it was”, 26 June 2025. ↩

24. MoneyVox, “FICP”, 25 August 2026; Banque de France, L’essentiel du surendettement en 2025. ↩ ↩²

25. Banque de France, Fichier national des incidents de remboursement des crédits aux particuliers; Service-public.gouv.fr, Fichier central des chèques, updated 21 July 2026. ↩ ↩²

26. Conseil constitutionnel, Décision n° 2014-690 DC, 13 March 2014 (considérants 53 to 57). ↩

27. Crésus, Registre national des crédits. ↩

28. Le Journal de l’Agence, “Crédit immobilier : les règles du HCSF ne bougent pas”, 23 September 2026. ↩ ↩²

29. Court of Justice of the European Union, Press release 186/23, case C-634/21, 7 December 2023. ↩

30. Teltarif, “Neuer Schufa-Score”, 7 September 2026; Schufa, Free Schufa score. ↩ ↩²

31. Netzpolitik.org, “Schufa speichert alte Datensätze über Millionen von Menschen”, 15 July 2026. ↩

32. Financial Conduct Authority, CP26/7: Credit information market study, 25 February 2026. ↩

33. Légifrance, Ordonnance n° 2025-880 du 3 septembre 2025. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

34. Légifrance, Décret n° 2026-105 du 19 février 2026; L’Officiel des métiers, “Crédit à la consommation : ce que change le décret du 1er août 2026”. ↩

35. Cafpi, “Réforme du crédit conso 2026 : à partir du 20 novembre, le FICP consulté avant tout prêt”. ↩

36. Hunton Andrews Kurth, “EU Digital Omnibus on AI enters into force”, 28 July 2026. ↩

37. CNIL, “Demandes de crédit : comprendre l’utilisation de vos données et vos droits”, 7 May 2026. ↩