Key takeaways
- There is no single UK credit score. Experian rates you on a 0 to 1250 scale, ClearScore on 0 to 1000 and Credit Karma on 0 to 710.
- Experian calls 861 to 1000 good and 1121 to 1250 excellent. Equifax calls 811 to 1,000 excellent. Those bands are the agencies' own, not any lender's cut-off.
- The agencies' 2020 joint guide is blunt: hard searches can affect your credit score, soft searches cannot, and checking your own file leaves only a soft footprint.
- A county court judgment sits on the public register for 6 years. Experian keeps credit account performance data for 11 years, 6 of them for live lending decisions.
- Since 2018 the FCA has required lenders to assess both credit risk and affordability risk. Neither limb mentions the score an agency shows you.
You don't have a credit score, you have several, and lenders see none of them
"What's my credit score, and what does it need to be?" is the question. The honest answer starts by taking the question apart.
There is no single number. Experian's guide to why scores differ between sites is explicit: "Experian rates your creditworthiness on a scale of 0 to 1250, while ClearScore uses 0 to 1000 and Credit Karma uses 0 to 710". ClearScore shows you a score built from Equifax data. Credit Karma shows you one built from TransUnion data. Three services, three scales, three different files underneath.
Equifax says the same of its own product: "There's no such thing as a universal credit score, each credit score is created by lenders or credit reference agencies as a way of measuring an individual's creditworthiness". Experian's guide on what affects your score adds the part most people miss. "No-one has a single credit score", it says, and "many lenders also calculate their own credit scores in house". You have several. You just can't see most of them.
So the number on your phone is one agency's reading of one version of your file, on a scale that agency invented. The lender you apply to is running its own model. The chart below puts the three consumer scales side by side. One reality, three incompatible numbers.
The file is a record of accounts, not a verdict
Underneath the score sits something concrete. The three agencies publish a joint privacy notice, and it lists what they hold. Identifiers. Electoral register data. Credit account performance data. Rental data. Current account turnover. Salary declared on applications. Open banking transactions. Court judgment data, insolvency data, fraud prevention indicators and search footprints.
Credit account performance data does the heavy lifting. In the notice's words it covers "the date the account was opened, the account number, the amount of debt outstanding (if any), any credit available (including overdraft limits) and the repayment history on the account, including late and missing payments". Judgment data comes from Registry Trust Limited, which maintains the statutory public registers. Insolvency data comes from The Insolvency Service and the Gazettes.
How long any of it stays has a published answer. GOV.UK is explicit on judgments: a county court or high court judgment "will stay on the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines for 6 years". Pay quickly and it goes. "If you pay the full amount within one month, you can get the judgment removed from the register", the guidance says.
Experian publishes its own retention table. Credit account performance data is held for "11 years", which "consists of six years for live decision-making plus a further five years for profiling and statistical analysis". Only the first six years feed live lending decisions. Salary declared on an application is shorter: "12 months for live decision making plus a further 5 years" of analysis. Equifax and TransUnion set their own periods, and the joint notice says so.
One entry catches people out. If two of you hold joint credit, the agencies record a financial association, and it shows on both files. The notice draws the line carefully. "Just sharing an address with someone or even being married to them (but not having any joint credit) does not make them a financial associate."
Lenders score you, and since 2018 the FCA has told them what to score for
Here's the part that reframes everything. The agencies say in their own joint notice that they don't decide anything. "We do not tell organisations what decisions to make about consumers." And more bluntly: "we are not the decision maker".
The Information Commissioner's Office guidance on credit describes what happens instead. "Each lender will have its own credit scoring system and will decide how many points to give each piece of information." Then the sentence that matters: "Each lender will also decide how many points you need to reach its own 'pass-mark'". Which is why, in the guidance's words, "you may be refused by one lender but accepted by another".
The agencies' joint consumer guide sizes the gap. "For certain credit products, lenders may use hundreds of different factors to create a score." Your Experian number is not one of those factors. It's a rendering of the same raw material, built for you rather than for the lender.
Regulation points the same way. Under the FCA's consumer credit rules, in force since 1 November 2018, "a firm must undertake a reasonable assessment of the creditworthiness of a customer" before lending. The firm has to consider two separate risks. One is "the risk that the customer will not make repayments under the agreement by their due dates", which the rules call credit risk. The other is "the risk to the customer of not being able to make repayments", which they call affordability risk. Information from a credit reference agency comes in only "where necessary".
A lender pricing the first risk is doing roughly what a bond investor does when they decompose a credit spread into default probability and loss given default. The second risk has no analogue in your score at all. You can have an immaculate file and be declined because the repayment doesn't fit your income. The ICO guidance puts it plainly: "even if you repay your existing credit accounts on time, a lender may not want to overburden you with more".
What the agencies say moves the file, and the weights none of them publish
Ask the agencies what matters and you get a consistent, unquantified list. Payment history. Credit utilisation, meaning how much of your available credit you're using. How recently and how often you've applied. Whether you're on the electoral register. How long your accounts have been open.
The joint guide offers one of the few hard numbers in this area. It suggests you "avoid borrowing more than 30% of the limit on any of your credit cards if you can", because "the lower the 'utilisation' the better". Its glossary makes the mechanism concrete. "A balance of £2,950 on a credit card with a limit of £3,000 shows a high level of utilisation." That band is the agencies' own guidance. It is not a threshold in anybody's scorecard.
Recency beats depth. Experian says "most of the information in your credit report is held for around six years, and companies often focus their credit scoring on more recent information". Equifax gives you the shape of its scale rather than its arithmetic: excellent runs 811 to 1,000, and a poor score "sits below 438".
Here the published record runs out. None of the three UK agencies publishes the weight it gives each factor. Experian will say only that agencies differ. "Some may give more weight to recent missed payments. Others may give more weight to your credit utilisation." The tidy percentage breakdowns that circulate online come from no UK credit reference agency's published material. None of the three publishes one, so no weights appear in this piece.
Nor is a lender obliged to explain itself. The ICO is direct: "Lenders do not have to give you details of how their credit scoring works." The joint guide agrees, while preserving a right worth knowing. If you're refused, "you have the right to ask the lender to explain the main reasons why". If a computer made the decision on its own, you can ask for a person to review it.
Checking your own file is a soft search, and the blacklist doesn't exist
Two myths do real damage. Both have flat contradictions in primary sources.
The first is that looking at your own report harms it. The joint guide settles it in one line: "hard searches can affect your credit score, soft searches cannot". On checking your own file, the same guide answers the myth head-on. "You can do this as often as you like with no impact as it leaves only soft search footprints." Experian's wording is stronger still. Check your own score and report as often as you like, it says, and "it will never have a negative impact on your score".
Hard footprints are the ones that travel. Experian keeps them visible to lenders for one year. Soft footprints, including eligibility checks on comparison sites, are visible only to you. What does damage a file is a cluster of real applications. The guide warns that "applying for credit many times within a short space of time might negatively affect your ability to get credit in the future". The defence is cash you don't have to borrow, which is a question of how large a buffer your income volatility calls for rather than a question of scoring.
The second myth is the blacklist. The joint guide: "There is no such thing as a credit blacklist." The ICO: "Credit reference agencies do not hold blacklists and do not tell a lender if it should offer you credit — that is for the lender to decide." Equifax, on the same belief, says it "isn't true and is one of many credit score myths".
Its cousin is the cursed address. The ICO guidance disposes of that too: "Who used to live at your address does not affect your credit score." Only a genuine financial association links two files. The same guidance notes what scoring has to ignore, namely "your sex, religion, race, political beliefs, sexuality or criminal record".
The counter-case: sometimes the agency's score is the only score
The strongest objection to all of this comes from the agencies' own guide, and it deserves its full weight. Listing the types of score you may have, the guide includes scores that a lender asks an agency to produce. Those scores, it says, "may be used to complement their own scores or they may be the only scores that they use as part of their decision-making process".
So a lender without its own scorecard may buy an agency score and use nothing else. A smaller firm, or one entering a new product line, is the obvious case. The joint privacy notice confirms the plumbing. The agencies "build their own scorecards, run data through their own scorecards and share their own scores with lenders".
Two things still separate that from the number on your phone. The score sold to a lender is built for that lender's product and cut-off. The one you see is, in the guide's words, "a guide credit score to help you understand how lenders might assess your credit report information". And even a perfect score settles nothing. Experian: "there is no specific score that guarantees acceptance for credit". Equifax: "Even a perfect score would not guarantee you getting accepted for every loan."
The reasonable position sits between the two extremes. Your consumer score isn't the thing lenders use. It isn't noise either. It moves when the file moves, and the file is what lenders read. As a thermometer for the file's condition it earns its place. As a threshold you have to clear, it misleads.
What this evidence cannot tell you
Start with the biggest limitation. No UK agency publishes its weightings. So nobody outside those companies can tell you what one missed payment costs in points, or how long the effect lasts. Anyone who gives you that number is guessing.
The retention periods above are Experian's published table. The joint notice states that each agency keeps data for different periods, so an item that has aged off one file may still sit on another. The 6-year judgment rule comes from GOV.UK and describes the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines. Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own registers and their own instruments, including decrees and trust deeds.
The joint consumer guide carries a 2020 copyright, jointly owned by the three agencies. Its retention figures match the current Experian table and the current GOV.UK guidance. But it predates the scale change Experian began rolling out in autumn 2025. The Experian score moved then from "0 to 999" to "0 to 1250". Any article quoting a 999 top score is describing the previous scale, and a good deal of what is still online does.
One source gap is worth naming. TransUnion's own consumer pages could not be retrieved for this piece. The 0 to 710 range here is therefore Experian's published description of Credit Karma's scale, and Credit Karma is the service that delivers TransUnion's UK score. No figure is attributed to TransUnion directly, though TransUnion co-authored both the guide and the privacy notice used throughout.
Finally, none of this converts into a probability. There is no published mapping from any consumer score to an acceptance rate at any lender. A sample of your friends' experiences is not one either.
What would change the conclusion
If a UK agency published its scorecard weights, the honest "we don't know" above would collapse into arithmetic. The advice industry built on guessing at weights would go with it. Nothing in the FCA rules requires that disclosure, and nothing suggests it is coming.
If the file stopped being the main input, the whole frame shifts. That process has started. Experian's stated reason for the wider scale is that "banks and lenders are now looking at new data when making decisions, such as rent, overdrafts, and mortgage overpayments". Rental data and current account turnover already sit in the joint notice's list. A decision driven mostly by open banking transactions is a different decision from one driven by a six-year repayment record.
If lenders had to publish their pass-marks, the score-versus-file distinction would stop mattering to a borrower, because the threshold would be visible. Today it isn't. The ICO guidance confirms that lenders need not explain their systems at all.
Until then, the useful object is the file, not the number. It's free to see. It's the same raw material every lender reads. And it's the only part of this you can correct. A credit file is a liability record, which is why LedgerTouch tracks liabilities beside assets: what you owe, and how you're servicing it, drives more decisions than any single score. The number is a summary. Read the file.