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So i paid all of my credit cards down to 0 except for one. I got an alert that one of my cards reported a 0 from holding a balance for what seemed like forever but i received no points.Do you earn points for individual utilization or overall utilization. I would be going from 90%overall utilization to 31%.
Fari Isaac has stated on numerous occasions that scoring of util of revolving credit is a combination of scoring of overall % util and of the % util of each individual account.
Anectotal posts here in the forum indicate that overall % util is weighed higher than combined effect of individual accounts.
Being, for example, at 95% util on one card while still having an overall % util of 10% is not the same as having all cards at 10%.
So from what I am gathering i will receive the biggest jump when it reports that the overall utilization has dropped?
@Anonymous wrote:So i paid all of my credit cards down to 0 except for one. I got an alert that one of my cards reported a 0 from holding a balance for what seemed like forever but i received no points.Do you earn points for individual utilization or overall utilization. I would be going from 90% overall utilization to 31%.
Overall utilization has a much greater impact on score than does individual card utilization. Some milestones for overall utilization to target are: below 80%, below 50%, below 20% and below 10%. Going from 90% to 31% will result in a significant score boost. You will see another nice boost when overall UT drops below 20%. .
Individual card utilization does not have much of an impact unless it is/was maxed out (generally assumed to be around 80%) or sometimes when it is at zero (see below). I allow individual cards to report utilizations up to at least 50% and it has no effect on score - no impact because overall utilization was maintained at a low level and that's the trigger.
The number of cards that report a non zero balance is a factor looked at in credit scoring. Your score will drop if none of your cards report a balance (red flag for no recent use of credit). Generally reporting a zero balance on all cards but one - as you are doing - will help optimize score as well.