How to Check Your FICO Score and VantageScore for Free

When you apply for any form of credit, whether that be a credit card, a mortgage loan, or an auto loan, it is almost a certainty that one or more of your credit scores will be procured by the lender. 

Credit scores, which have been around for decades, have long been an integral part of a lender’s risk assessment and underwriting practices. 

For many years, credit scores were not available to consumers anywhere. Then, credit scores started to become available for purchase through a variety of websites. 

Now, credit scores are widely available at no cost. So, before you grab your wallet, here’s how to check your FICO Score and VantageScore for free.

In my 33+ years in the credit industry, it has become clear that there is still a great deal of confusion about credit reports and credit scores. While this article is not going to take a deep dive into credit-related myths, I will point out that countless consumers believe credit reports and credit scores are the same thing. They are not!

A credit report is a compilation of information housed in a consumer reporting agency’s database. This information, which generally comes from one of the Big 3 credit bureaus, does not automatically include a credit score. In fact, prior to 1989, credit reports were just that … credit reports.

A credit score is a three-digit number designed to predict the risk of doing business with a consumer based on the information contained in their credit report. The easiest way to think of the two is this: A credit report is like a test you take in school, and the credit score is the grade you made on the test.

A credit score cannot exist without a credit report first being compiled by a credit bureau. Credit scores are entirely dependent on the information in your credit report. 

Conversely, credit reports can exist without a credit score. In fact, the law does not recognize a credit score as being a component of a credit report, which is why you do not have the right to free annual credit scores like you have the right to free annual credit reports. We’ll dig more into that later. 

Just because you checked your credit reports does not mean you checked your credit scores. And just because you checked your credit scores does not mean you checked your credit reports. You certainly can check both at the same time, which is the wise thing to do.

When it comes to credit reports, there is no need to buy them. You have had the right to free annual credit reports since FACTA (the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003) amended the FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) in 2003. 

This is the law that required the credit bureaus to create and maintain a central source where you can claim your free credit reports. That central source is the website I write about often, www.annualcreditreport.com. At that site, you can claim your free Equifax, Experian, and/or TransUnion credit reports pursuant to federal law.

While you still only have the right to one free credit report from each credit bureau once every 12 months, the credit bureaus have made a business decision to essentially unlock the AnnualCreditReport.com website functionality and allow all of us to claim free credit reports every week. 

This has been the reality since COVID, and the credit bureaus have gone on record that this weekly freebie is going to be permanent. The website is not going to win any awards for aesthetics, but if you want to claim free credit reports from a reputable and authoritative source, that is the place. 

If you are asked to provide a credit card number or any other method of payment, you are on the wrong website.

If you have a good memory, you may remember the days when credit scores were not available to consumers, anywhere. They were, and still are, a tool used primarily by lenders, and consumers had no access to them — unless you happened to work at a car dealership or for a mortgage broker. 

When the internet started to become more of a real thing several years before the turn of the century, credit scores became a consumer product sold online either as single-score purchase transactions or as part of recurring subscription services.

And, some of the scores sold to consumers were not FICO scores, calling into question their value to the consumers buying them.

Now, the credit score has evolved to a free component of either your bank statements or as a loss leader to entice consumers to become registered users of various websites.

For example, FICO’s Open Access program allows lenders with whom you already have relationships to share the FICO scores they are already using for account management purposes with their customers, you! 

If you’re unsure if your bank, card issuer, or credit union participates in FICO’s Open Access program, you can check with your lender. According to FICO, there are over 200 financial institutions that provide free FICO scores to their customers. 

CNBC and other sources report that the list of some notable financial institutions that participate in the program — and also provide FICO scores through other direct relationships — includes American Express, Bank of America, Citibank, Discover, Capital One, and Wells Fargo.

If you live a relatively credit-free life, then you may have to go to a credit bureau to get a free FICO score. The credit bureau Experian will give you a free FICO score if you are willing to become a registered user of its website. 

There are also many options for you to claim free VantageScore credit scores. Those include banking relationships and other relationships you may have with different consumer credit-related websites where you have become a registered user. 

According to VantageScore Solutions, the list of some notable financial institutions that provide free VantageScore credit scores includes US Bank, Chase, Self, OneMain Financial, and Synchrony Bank.

The short answer to both questions posed in the paragraph header above is: Yes! There are so many places where you can get a legitimate FICO score or VantageScore at no cost to you, other than the time it takes to find it on your statement or on a website. 

FICO and VantageScore are not the same thing, other than both being tri-bureau credit scoring systems. If your FICO score is 700, your VantageScore will not be 700 — and vice versa. The two scoring companies are competitors, not collaborators.

That means their models are different, how their models consider credit report information is different, and that all means your scores are going to be different. 

That’s why I’m of the opinion that you should check both, especially since they are both free.

The same goes for your credit reports. You have three of them, not just one. And the likelihood that all three of your credit reports will be identical is very low. If you are going to check one of them, take a few more minutes and check the other two. It will be free, so it will only cost you the time.

Credit scores, formally referred to as credit bureau-based risk scores, are not new. In fact, credit bureau scores have been around for more than 35 years. They have become ubiquitous in almost all facets of consumer credit, including prospecting, underwriting, term assignment, account management, and collections and recovery. 

Despite a small but vocal critical minority, credit scores transformed lending and led to instant credit and smarter and more consistent credit decisions. Credit scores, almost always a three-digit number ranging from 300 on the low end to 850 on the high end, summarize the information on your credit reports. 

There was a time when credit reports, which can be dozens of pages long, were the sole risk assessment tool used by lenders when making decisions. Today, lenders can craft and deploy lending policies through a branch and online network that blankets the country, built around a three-digit number.

This transformed lending from a lumbering dinosaur, where it routinely took weeks or months to get lending decisions to simple loan applications, to a Ferrari where you can walk into a car dealership and drive off the lot in a matter of hours will a fully funded car loan from a lender that doesn’t even have a branch in your state. 

The era of instant credit can thank the credit score for its existence.

The first company that made a real splash in credit score development was Fair, Isaac and Company, which was eventually named the Fair Isaac Corporation, which we all know now as simply FICO. 

FICO is largely credited with inventing credit scores, and its scoring tools have become extremely popular not only in the United States but also around the globe.       

In 1989, the first FICO-branded credit bureau score became commercially available at Equifax, branded as BEACON. Soon after, by 1991, both TransUnion and TRW also released FICO-developed credit scores for commercial use, known as EMPIRICA at TransUnion and the TRW/FICO Score at TRW.

For decades, the FICO score was both the industry standard and the only game in town. If you are wondering what TRW is, it was a Big 3 credit reporting agency that got out of the credit bureau business. In 1996, their data was eventually acquired by the company we now know as Experian. 

In 2006, the first VantageScore-branded credit bureau score became commercially available across all three major credit reporting agencies, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. VantageScore is a product of the three credit bureaus, meaning VantageScore is owned collectively by Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

The three major credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion — came together to create VantageScore.

While FICO does not publish the volume of its scores used annually, its scores are still viewed as the leading credit score and largely the only score used for mortgage lending as of mid-2025. The VantageScore credit score was used some 42 billion times in 2024. 

That’s not a typo, 42 billion scores. For the sake of relativity, 42 billion is about 190 times the number of credit reports maintained by any one of the Big 3 credit bureaus. The bottom line is that a mind-blowing number of credit scores are calculated annually using the FICO and VantageScore credit scoring models.

Checking your credit scores for free is the current reality, and there is no reason to believe the momentum will ever switch back to when credit scores were available only to banks and other organizations that used them to make business decisions. 

In fact, it is highly likely that you already have a banking relationship with a financial institution or website that gives away either free FICO scores or free VantageScore credit scores. 

The next time you are in the market for a loan or a credit card, or you are just curious about your credit scores, it is in your best interest to check them and your credit reports several weeks or even months before making the application. 

The barrier to entry of cost is long gone. That means you are not going to need your wallet or any form of payment the next time you want to see if you are a FICO 750, or maybe even better!