Does My Income Affect Credit Score?

Your income will only affect your credit score in an indirect way. Whats important is your borrowing and payment history, based on the FICO credit scoring model. As long as your income is well above your debt obligations, you should have no problems with monthly payments. That is why some people think that income does affect your FICO score.

However, when you approach online lenders, they do ask for your income info. This is being prudent, since they may not want to give a $5000 unsecured loan to a borrower with $1500 monthly income. Most lenders have other lending guidelines aside from checking your FICO credit score, that is your how much you make monthly affects whether you can get a loan or not.


More important than having a high income is your debt to income ratio. If you earn $5000 monthly but needs to pay $4800 of credit card debts etc, financially you are no better than someone earning $1500 but debt free. Most lenders will check that your loan payments (mortgage, car loan, student loan, credit cards etc) are not more than 40% of your income.