Experian FICO Scores Available to Consumers Again. Should You Buy?

It’s official. myFICO.com, the consumer division of Fair Isaac, is now making available your Experian credit report and FICO score based on Experian data. FICO has quietly released the Experian/FICO report/score combo on their website, meaning the fanfare seems to have been kept to a minimum, at least for now. So, should you go ahead and buy your Experian FICO score now that it’s available for the first time since February of 2009?

Experian and FICO have a long history offering FICO’s scores to lenders and other “commercial” users. And even long before Experian became Experian, FICO and TRW Credit Services offered FICO scores based on the data that is now owned by Experian. And, for several years they had a “consumer direct” partnership that made FICO scores based on Experian data available to consumers via myFICO.com. But that slice of their partnership fell apart with both parties blaming the other and in February of 2009 Experian FICO scores were no longer available via myFICO’s website. Thankfully the two credit giants have buried the hatchet and a little over 4 years later we again have access to 3 of our FICO scores.

The current price tag for one of your FICO scores and one of your credit reports at myFICO is a strange $16.61. For all three, $49.83. That’s the discounted price.  The rack rate is normally $19.95 each or $59.85 for the trio of reports and FICO scores.

Unlikely to be the same FICO score used by your lender

While it is 100% true that FICO is the industry standard credit score, there are over 50 different versions of their risk scores commercially available. So, it’s very unlikely that the FICO score you buy at myFICO is going to be the same one your credit card issuer, auto lender or other lenders are using.  The scores are likely to be similar but unlikely to be identical.

The “it’s similar” argument use to be a good one. I mean, “close” works in the credit scoring world. If your actual FICO score pulled by Bank of America’s credit card group is 720 and the score you buy at myFICO is 726 then that’s close enough that the two scores mean essentially the same thing relative to your risk.

But, there are also several free options on the market today that might also be “close enough.” At the publication date of this article I can name at least 5 free credit score options. None of them are a FICO score but most of them are commercially available credit scores and are scaled either exactly like FICO’s 300 to 850 or are “close enough” that the consumer is unlikely to be able to tell the difference. You can get your VantageScore credit score from two sources, a TransUnion credit score from another, and an Experian credit score from another.

Let’s say we lived in the perfect world as it pertains to credit scores and we were able to buy our FICO scores, all of them, and at the same time know exactly which of the 50+ versions our lenders use. Even then there’s no guarantee that the score you bought would be the same one your lender pulled.

First off, you’d have to know which credit report the lender is going to pull. If your lender is pulling your Equifax credit report and you buy or bought a FICO score based on TransUnion data, the scores are unlikely to be the same because the credit report data is almost certainly going to be different.

Second, even if you did know which credit report the lender was going to pull, your timing would have to be perfect in order to see the same numeric score.  Credit reports are updated constantly throughout the month by your creditors. So, if you bought a score today it would very likely be different if your lender pulled the same credit report and score a few weeks later.