Should You Worry About Getting a Perfect Credit Score?

Boosting your credit score is a good way to improve your personal finances. You can get better interest rates on loans and lower insurance premiums. But chasing a perfect credit score is a pursuit with diminishing returns, and after a certain point, all that’s left is bragging rights.

The highest credit score is 850 for both FICO and the newest models from VantageScore. (The original VantageScore went as high as 990.) About a quarter of the U.S. population scores in the highest range above 800, but there are no stats showing how many people hit the peak score each year. The goal, though, is largely pointless.

“No, it doesn’t matter, and I say that as someone who once herself was a bit obsessed with the perfect credit score,” says Sarah Davies, senior vice president of product management and analytics at VantageScore Solutions. “Lenders rarely hold consumers to perfection.”

Is 850 worth it?

For instance, borrowers need just a 760 credit score—or 90 points below perfection—to get the best rate on a mortgage. Even lower credit scores are needed for the best rates on auto loans and credit cards. An 850 simply doesn’t offer any extra benefit.

Even if you do get a perfect score, it doesn’t stay there forever. A credit score is a snapshot in time and can regularly migrate 20 points as your credit behavior changes—even minutely. A score may drop a few points from one month to the next if you charge slightly more on your credit cards, says Tom Quinn, vice president of myFICO.com, FICO’s consumer-facing division.

Your credit score also varies across different score models. An 850 FICO score doesn’t always equal an 850 VantageScore. You also may have an 850 on a FICO score tailored for credit card issuers, but only an 830 on one made for mortgages. Still, the differences shouldn’t be significant. “If you’re scoring high in one version, you’re scoring high on all,” says Quinn.

How to get there?

FICO last year examined the behaviors of the so-called “highest achievers,” those with scores between 800 and 850. This group represents 23% of the score-able U.S. population, is largely older—the average age is 61 years—and collectively averages an 826 score.

Of course, these highest achievers manage their debt responsibly, but to what degree better than the total population? For starters, despite having four more credit cards on average than the total population, the highest scorers keep lower balances and use significantly less of their available credit. The amount of their other debt is smaller, and nearly all manage to pay their bills on time, all the time.

Those characteristics—part of the amounts owed and payment history categories—represent 65% of a FICO credit score. But that’s not enough.

“Everybody can pay their bills on time and have low or no credit card debt, so what else do you have to do to get the elusive 850?” says John Ulzheimer, credit expert who formerly worked for FICO and Equifax. “It’s really the components of a credit score that no one focuses on.”

The first is length of credit history, which makes up 15% of your FICO credit score. FICO found that the highest achievers had much older accounts than those of the total population, which helped to boost their scores:

Ulzheimer also surmises that credit mix—which makes up another 10% of a credit score—is another key to getting closer to 850. Generally, a credit score benefits if a person responsibly manages different types of credit. But a person’s credit mix doesn’t start diversifying until she gets older and meets milestones like buying a car or house.

“That’s why people my age can max out their credit score because they have auto loans, mortgages and credit cards accounts,” says Ulzheimer. “Those are the boxes you have to check in order to get an 850.”

Who’s done it?

So the perfect score is possible, if unlikely and fleeting. Ulzheimer held onto an 850 FICO score last year for three straight months. Tom Quinn’s wife also did it even though he’s the one who works for FICO. “I graciously congratulated her,” he said, “and then reminded her I can get the credit I want with the score I have.”

And Sarah Davies once attained a perfect 990 from the original VantageScore before its score range changed to the 300-850 range in the newer 3.0 version. The result? It knocked Davies’s score down from perfect to only stellar.

“I thought: ‘Well, that’s crap. Let’s develop 4.0,” she says with a laugh.