You can't trust any third party service; not even MF (FICO Consumer) when it comes to rounding potentially.
If you want to know, test it. Eventually I'll get off my ass (namely when the Freedom no longer has 5x for restaurants most likely) and find a breakpoint on individual tradeline utilization and then testing rounding for that; however, that might not hold for aggregate.
When I was playing with AAOA it seemed to round fractional months up and then down on the years bit, but it's hard to say.
@Anonymous wrote:How does rounding work with respect to utilization % both on a single account and aggregate?
I always thought that the % always rounded down to the nearest whole number. For example, 9.84% utilization on a single account would be seen as 9% utilization. Is that correct, or would it round up to 10%?
When talking aggregate utilization, if you have whole number utilization on one account, say 2%, but your overall aggregate utilization is less than 1%, say .4%, is your entire utilization then seen as 0%?
I ask this because when I pulled my 3B scores today I noticed a drop across all bureaus, and the reason was because of "not using credit" - "your credit report shows no recent balances on your revolving accounts." One of my revolving accounts does have a balance though, $242 on a $9600 limit which is 2-3% utilization depending on if it rounds up or down. My aggregate utilization however is .4% when taking into account all lines of credit. Does this mean that in order to maximize my credit scores I need to report a monthly balance of roughly $600 on one account so that my aggregate utilization is at least 1% (whole number not rounded up)? That seems a bit ridiculous to me.
Is there something else obvious that I'm missing here?
I have looked at summary reports from EQ, TU, EX, CK, CS, MyFICO and others. Some aggregate utilization as a whole number while others display the percent in 0.1% increments. Some reports include AU accounts in the calculation while others do not.
Regardless of the display ... Fico 08 rounds up aggregate utilization for use in model scoring. Odds are the same approach would be used on an individual card basis. However, if charge is below some trivial amount (say $3), the balance is treated as zero.
As mentioned up thread, Fico 08 does not consider balances on AU cards when computing total balance nor AG UT% (earlier Fico models do). Charge cards are considered when computing total balance but the charge card balance(s) are not included in the numerator for AG UT% calculation.
Go to your account and look at the scoring details section in the score tab. [Note for the below I had one revolving credit card reporting a $33 balance and AMEX reporting $1997. I also had an AU card reporting a $576 balance. The AU card is not included in the below total balance. Although the charge card does show in the total balance it is not included in AG UT % calculation. I know this because when the card with a $33 balance updated to report $0, my total balance dropped to $1997 (AMEX card) and my utilization dropped to 0% from 1%. In both situations the AU card still showed the $576 balance.
I have conclusive data that verifies the below Ag UT l% which shows 1% is based solely on a single personal revolving credit card with a $33 balance.
This represented an AG UT of slightly over 0.03% which shows as 1% and was recognized as non zero in my 3B report. Utilization is rounded up to the next highest whole number for Fico presentation (1%) - not to the nearest whole number (0%).
