Cities Where Credit Scores Are The Most and Least Improved

Experts' Take

To vary our coverage of the cities with most improved credit scores, we put the data aside and sought out experts for answers to questions of concern.

Robert Harrow

Robert is the Senior Credit Card Analyst at ValuePenguin and has been covering the industry for over 2 years.

• What's the biggest thing people get wrong about credit scores?

  You shouldn't think of only the three-digit number. Your credit report is arguably more important. The score is just a quick summary of the information contained within the reports. You should try to never confuse the two. Most lenders will look at your report when making their decision about your application.

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Ting Pen

Ting is the Co-Founder of ValuePenguin. She was formerly a financial analyst at Citigroup.

• What's the quickest way someone can raise their credit score?

  The one thing consumers need to know is that raising a credit score takes a long time. On the other hand, trashing your score can be lightning fast. That's why it is crucial to be both patient and careful when working on rebuilding one's credit score. Make your payments on time, avoid taking on needless debt and start paying more attention to your finances. Avoid the mentality that you can do it quickly -- it can only lead to trouble.

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DJ Kang

DJ is a former hedge fund analyst and the head of ValuePenguin Asia.

• Are credit scores important in cities outside of the U.S.?

  The idea of a credit score, while not unique, isn't very popular globally. Canada and the U.K. you can see systems that resemble what we have in the U.S. However, if you look at some Asian countries, income plays a much larger role there when it comes to lending decisions and credit.

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Credit scores serve as one of the key metrics in determining the economic health of American consumers, reflecting the ease or difficulty by which people are able to make payments on their mortgage, car loans, and other obligations.

Previous studies have shown which cities in the U.S. perform the best when ranked by the average credit score of their population. For our analysis, we went a step further to rank more than 200 cities on how much the average credit score has changed between 2010 and 2016. That data offers an indicator of whether the city's financial health has been improving or declining.

The changes in credit score ranged from a 3% improvement (for Las Vegas NV) to a -2.1% decline (for Glendive MT). If those changes seem modest, consider that the national average change for these years was a meager 0.52% – meaning that scores in these outlier cities changed by five or more times the rate of the country as a whole.

While our ranking is based entirely on credit-score data, we also took a snapshot of current key indicators of credit health within these cities, such as delinquency rates, credit utilization, and the average credit card debt. Those comparisons, based on 2016 data, are covered in the sections below our coverage of cities with the most and least improved credit scores.

The Cities With The Most Improved Credit Scores

For the most part, the cities with the best track record of boosting credit scores are among the ones where scores probably lost ground in the years prior to 2010. In particular, several cities within the top 5, including Las Vegas and Phoenix, were among those whose housing markets were hit especially hard by the mortgage crisis. As homeowners in those and other cities foreclosed on mortgages for their overvalued homes, and even had their homes seized by banks, credit scores naturally took a huge hit. As both the economy and the housing markets have bounced back, credit scores, too, have recovered.

It's worth noting, however, that despite their gains almost all of these cities remain at or below the national average credit score of 670. In other words, they're on the road to recovery, but still not among the heathiest of cities as far as creditworthiness goes.

The Cities Where Credit Scores Worsened the Most

If the cities whose credit scores improved the most had nowhere to go but up, those that lagged arguably had nowhere to go but down. That is, many of them had (and still have, for the most part) credit scores that are above the national average of 670.

All of the Rest

The five above were tops, but 206 other cities were also considered. Where did yours rank?