FICO vs. VantageScore: What Is the Difference?

Origins and Ownership

FICO scores are produced by the Fair Isaac Corporation, an independent analytics company founded in 1956 by Bill Fair and Earl Isaac. Its first general-purpose credit bureau score launched in 1989, and the company licenses its models to the credit bureaus, which compute the score from the file they hold when a lender requests it. VantageScore was created in 2006 by the three nationwide bureaus themselves — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — operating VantageScore Solutions as a separate venture. The structural difference matters: FICO is a vendor selling models to the bureaus, while VantageScore was designed by the bureaus to run on a single shared methodology across all three files, which was one of its stated objectives from the outset.

Scoring Ranges

Both current models use a range of 300 to 850, with higher numbers indicating lower assessed risk. This has not always been true and is a common source of confusion with older material. VantageScore 1.0 and 2.0 used a 501 to 990 range; VantageScore 3.0, released in 2013, adopted the 300 to 850 range, and 4.0 and later versions kept it. FICO has used 300 to 850 for its general-purpose scores throughout, though it also publishes industry-specific variants — for auto lending and bankcards, for instance — that run from 250 to 900. Because the ranges now match, the numbers look directly comparable, but they are produced by different models and a consumer's FICO and VantageScore figures on the same day will usually differ.

Minimum File Requirements

This is the most substantive difference between the two. To generate a classic FICO score, a file must generally contain at least one account opened at least six months earlier and at least one account reported to the bureau within the past six months. A file that fails those tests is unscorable by that model. VantageScore was built to score thinner files: its models can generally produce a score from a file with as little as one month of history, provided at least one account has been reported within the past twenty-four months. The consequence is that some consumers with limited history have a VantageScore and no FICO score at all, which is one reason the two figures are not interchangeable.

Factor Weighting and Treatment of Specific Items

• Published weights: FICO publishes approximate percentage weights — payment history about 35 percent, amounts owed about 30 percent, length of history about 15 percent, new credit about 10 percent, credit mix about 10 percent. VantageScore instead describes its factors by relative influence, generally ranking payment history as most influential, followed by measures of credit utilisation and the depth and age of the file.
• Rate-shopping windows: Multiple inquiries of the same type made while shopping for a single loan are grouped so they count once. Older FICO models use a 14-day window; models from FICO 04 onward use 45 days. VantageScore models use a 14-day window and group across loan types.
• Paid collections: Both FICO 9 and later and VantageScore 3.0 and later disregard collection accounts that have been paid.
• Medical debt: Newer models of both weigh unpaid medical collections less heavily than other collections; the nationwide bureaus have also changed which medical collection items they report at all.

Where Each One Is Used

Both are widely used, but not in the same places. FICO has historically dominated lender underwriting — the company reports that its scores are used in the large majority of US lending decisions — and mortgage underwriting in particular has long relied on specific older FICO versions specified by the government-sponsored enterprises. VantageScore is heavily used in the consumer-facing free score products offered by card issuers, banks, and personal finance websites, and in account monitoring and pre-screened marketing. That distribution explains a frequent complaint: the score a consumer sees free of charge is often a VantageScore, while the score a lender pulls is often a FICO of a particular version, so the two rarely match exactly. Neither figure is the score; both are estimates from different models of the same underlying file.