<prompt> Human: A mortgage banker I am talking with said my credit score for a mortgage is different than my consumer score. Maybe hes talking about FICO vs Vantage? Basically I could have a 820 score with the 3 bureau, but a 680 when banks look at it for a mortgage. Because, I dont carry a couple hundred dollars balance on my revolving accounts. I thought you get a better score from paying off your balances and maintaining access to large amounts of credit?  <response>: You have many different FICO scores. Yes, banks often though not always use a different scoring model than the ones you commonly get online either ones you pay for or the ones that you get free from sources like credit cards. FICO 8 is the most popular score overall, but look at the chart on this page from FICO: Link FICO 2, FICO 4 and FICO 5 are all commonly used in mortgage decisions. I cant tell you what the differences are between the models, but there are differences. Regardless, many mortgage lenders use the residential mortgage credit report, which are those three scores from the bureaus you can see in the chart on the page I linked above. That said, I highly doubt that carrying a balance on your revolving accounts would positively affect those scores. No one knows for sure because the models are trade secrets, but that just wouldnt make any sense. On the off chance that it is somehow considered, I dont see how it would make that much of a difference. 