 TITLE: What Is a FICO<sup>®<\/sup> Score, and Why Is It Important? CONTENT: Why Do I Have Different FICO® Scores?\n-------------------------------------\nFICO, which stands for the Fair Isaac Corporation, regularly updates the formula it uses to calculate FICO® Scores.\nCurrently, most lenders use the FICO® Score 8 formula. But there is a newer version, for instance, called the FICO® Score 9, which isn't yet widely adopted. The FICO® Score 9 reduces the impact of medical debt on your score and will add in rental payments to credit reports when landlords choose to report this information. That may help people without much credit history build a credit file.\nAdditionally, there are FICO® Scores geared toward different industries, such as auto lending, mortgage lending and credit card issuing. These measure and weight your financial information in slightly different ways.\nFinally, you may see different FICO® Scores depending on the credit bureau—Experian, TransUnion or Equifax—your lender pulls your score from. The bureaus may receive information from your creditors at different times over the course of a month, which affects, for instance, the amount of credit they'll report you're using, and thus your credit score. A lender may request credit scores from multiple bureaus for that reason. END