EX excluding a card from its utilization calculation

[expatCanuck]

I have credit lines totalling ~40K and reported balances of ~5.5K, for a util of ~14% ... and that's what EQ and TU report.  EX, however, reports a util of 22%, excluding a $14K line from one of my cards.

Would this be because I have an open dispute regarding that $14K line card?  (The dispute, btw, involves the issuer's historical reporting, not the current line or the balance now reported.  In any event, curious that EX excludes the available credit in its calculation, but not EQ orTU.)

[Anonymous]

When you say that EX says that you have a utilization of 22% whereas the other bureaus say you have a util of 14%, I am guessing that you are talking about what some third-party credit monitoring system (CMS) is saying about your utilization.  Examples of these third party tools are Credit Check Total, myFICO Ultimate, Discover Scorecard, Credit Karma, Credit.com, etc.  It's even possible that you are comparing what one CMS says (e.g. credit.com which is EX driven) vs what another CMS is saying (e.g. Karma which is TU/EQ driven).

So can you clarify what CMS is telling you this about your utilization?

Also, regarding the disputed tradeline, have you disputed this with all three bureaus? 

[expatCanuck]

The 3rd-party monitor is Experian.  And when I just looked at it just now, utilization is correctly showing 14%.

(But, truly, it had been showing 22% when I posted this message ... honest! )

In any event, it weirds me out that EX generates a score 10 points lower than EQ with fundamentally the same data.  Both even have 4 inquiries in the latter half of '17 (tho' with different spacing and some different actors).  I can reconcile TU's outlier score because (to my benefit) it has dropped a negative data point.

Curiously, my dispute was with EQ (because they're the only ones that show the whack data points), as well as with the card issuer itself.

[Anonymous]

The front-end "summary" page of a CMS (which describes your total credit limit, your utilization, your AAoA, etc.) cannot be relied on to reveal what the actual FICO scoring algorithm is doing on the back end.  The summary page for a CMS is programmed by one set of people, who work for the people who made the CMS -- and these people have nothing to do with the people who programmed the back-end algorithm over at FICO.

There's lot of examples we can give of this, but I assure you it is so.

Thus the summary page might say that your utilization is one thing, whereas the the FICO algorithm sees it as something else.  Same for age-related factors.  Etc.

[Anonymous]

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@expatCanuck wrote:

In any event, it weirds me out that EX generates a score 10 points lower than EQ with fundamentally the same data. 

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Try not to let this bother you, as it's 100% normal to have scores that differ by 10 points or more with identical profile data.  I'd say that 10-20 points of variance between top score and bottom score is extremely common.  Some have reported 30+ points; the highest variance I've seen reported personally on identical profile data with FICO 08 is 36 points.