Here's a data point on what happens when you go overlimit on one of your cards, even slightly:
Last month, I accidentally and temporarily let my Hilton Aspire AMEX go slightly over limit (101%) to pay for a family vacation to Hawaii. I typically use my Hilton card exclusively at their properties, and this was a big charge.
When AMEX reported that to the credit bureaus, my scores dropped around 20 points each. A month later, after I'd paid the card down to below 49% utilization, my scores rebounded accordingly:
- Equifax: +24
- Experian: +19
- TransUnion: +27
Of course, YMMV but it was a temporary setback, not a permanent decrease in scores.
Thank you for sharing the data point.
Unfortunately that's not necessarily over limit, that might just be usual 90% max (or whatever) to some non-max and any aggregate changes either?
Data problems 
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What I'd really like to see is someone at just over limit pays down to 98% or whatever. I might be able to do that actually, I'm probably going to have a couple 1Kish purchases in the new place, will see if I can route one just over 1K to the Amex BCE (sitting at 1k flat now) and then minimum pay it for giggles to take it just under.
@ridgebackpilot wrote:Here's a data point on what happens when you go overlimit on one of your cards, even slightly:
Last month, I accidentally and temporarily let my Hilton Aspire AMEX go slightly over limit (101%) to pay for a family vacation to Hawaii. I typically use my Hilton card exclusively at their properties, and this was a big charge.
When AMEX reported that to the credit bureaus, my scores dropped around 20 points each. A month later, after I'd paid the card down to below 49% utilization, my scores rebounded accordingly:
- Equifax: +24
- Experian: +19
- TransUnion: +27
Of course, YMMV but it was a temporary setback, not a permanent decrease in scores.
What are your scores? These movements are relative to those underlying FICO 8 scores Also, what is next highest utilization ( or over 49% ) on any other cards?
I agree with Rev, this is more likely just "exceeds 90%" rather than over the limit, but difficult to prove out. I have seen drops like this when taking a $500 card to 90% via BT to look at score changes, when scores are around 800.
A couple of the credit bureaus actually reported comments like, "Card no longer over credit limit" or "Number of cards over credit limit 1 -> 0". Which is what led me to think that such a large bump in scores was directly related to that. Of course, when the AMEX card was first reported over the limit, I saw an equivalent drop in scores, too.