For the first time in roughly three decades, the score that decides mortgage approvals is getting real competition. The new credit score models for mortgages, VantageScore 4.0 and FICO 10T, have been validated by the federal regulator that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the newer models work differently in two ways that matter to buyers: they look at 24 months of trended data instead of a single snapshot, and they can score rent, utility, and phone payments that classic FICO never saw. If you have been told your credit file is too thin to score, or that one rough stretch two years ago still defines you, this change is aimed at you. To get it straight from the source, we sat down with Tony Hutchinson, executive vice president at VantageScore, who spent ten years at Fannie Mae, a decade at Freddie Mac, and years shaping housing policy from Dodd-Frank through the qualified mortgage rules.
The conventional conforming market, the huge slice of lending that flows through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has run on one score for as long as most loan officers have been alive professionally: classic FICO, a model built in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In Josh's 30+ years in lending, there has never been an approved alternative. The consumer population changed enormously over those decades; the model did not.
Congress moved first. The Credit Score Competition Act, sponsored by Senators Tim Scott and Mark Warner and signed into law in 2018, required the door be opened to competing models. Tony walked us through the timeline from there: the following administration carried the evaluation most of the way, and in October 2022 the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced the two models that passed its validation, VantageScore 4.0 and FICO 10T. In July 2025, the FHFA's director ordered implementation with immediate effect, which, in Tony's words, kicked Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into high gear. (A caution on timing: as of this episode's air date, 9/1/2025, neither enterprise had announced a go-live date. Tony's read was that the teams were, as he put it, working feverishly, and his personal guess was before the end of 2025. Confirm the current state of the rollout with a lender.)
One thing worth saying plainly, because everything gets partisan now: this is not a partisan project. It started under the first Trump administration, advanced under the Biden administration, and is being implemented under the current one. The seven-year timeline just reflects how hard it is to change anything inside two government-sponsored enterprises still in conservatorship.
Classic FICO is a point-in-time model. It looks at your file today: today's balances, today's utilization, the derogatory marks currently reporting. VantageScore 4.0 instead evaluates a 24-month window of behavior. Tony's framing: the model can see whether you were great and trended down, were down and trended up, or have been steady all along, and each of those is priced as what it is.
For buyers, that cuts two ways, and both are honest improvements. If you went through a bad six months, the job loss, the divorce, the stretch where everything went wrong at once, the old model only saw the wreckage still on the report. The new model also sees the eighteen clean months since. As Tony put it, you no longer have to worry that they will not see the recovery; the trend plays to your benefit. The flip side is that cosmetic, last-minute polish matters less, because the model remembers where the file was a year ago. What does not change at all is error correction. Tony was emphatic that removing wrong information from your report remains worth every bit of the effort, because an accurate file produces the most accurate score. From the lending chair, the same is true of the cleanup work we do with buyers, the pay-for-deletion letters and targeted paydowns; that work still moves files, it just now compounds over time instead of resetting a snapshot.
The second change is the data itself. VantageScore 4.0 digs deeper into the files at all three bureaus and scores payment types classic FICO ignores: rent when it is reported, plus telecom and utility payments. Rent is the one Tony is most eager to expand, because a two-year history of on-time rent is about as direct a preview of mortgage behavior as data can offer, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been pushing property managers and rent-reporting services to get more of it into the bureaus. The catch today is coverage: only a slice of renters have their payments reported at all. If you are a renter with a thin file, asking whether your landlord or a rent-reporting service can report your history is one of the few genuinely new moves this era offers.
Add it up and the reach is large. VantageScore says its 4.0 model scores about 33 million more consumers than the classic model, spread across every state and nearly every county: thin-file young buyers, immigrant communities that culturally run on cash, rural households, veterans, even active-duty service members whose credit goes dormant during a deployment and comes back to a model that penalizes the silence. Tony was blunt about what that number does and does not mean: "We score 33 million more people. That does not mean 33 million more Americans are creditworthy." By his numbers, roughly two-thirds of the newly scored land below 620. The value is different, and real: a person with no score used to be dropped into the riskiest bucket by default and charged accordingly. A person with a low score has a number, a diagnosis, and a path, and for what that path looks like in practice, start with what credit score you need to buy a house and how to raise it.
The fastest-growing debt among younger buyers is mostly invisible to every scoring model: buy now, pay later. Those installment plans largely do not report to the bureaus, which is why some call it a shadow credit market. Tony told us VantageScore is pushing, alongside the bureaus and consumer groups, to get BNPL data captured, and the logic runs both directions. Unreported BNPL hides real debt from the model, and it also denies you credit for paying the plans off on time. Until the reporting catches up, do not mistake invisible for ignored: a mortgage underwriter reads your bank statements, and BNPL payments marching across them count against you in ways we break down in buying a house with credit card debt.
There is also a money angle, and we pushed Tony on it. When one company is the only approved score provider, nothing disciplines the price. From our side of the desk, the credit report line item on a mortgage file multiplied several times over in just a few years, from a cost nobody noticed to a three-figure charge, and that happened in the absence of any alternative. Tony could not discuss pricing at all, for antitrust reasons he was upfront about, but he made the broader case: a monopoly costs the market innovation as much as money, which is how the mortgage industry ended up qualifying 2025 borrowers on a 1980s model. Two competitors are not a guarantee of cheaper credit reports. One provider is close to a guarantee of expensive ones.
Nothing exotic. The fundamentals that win under the old model win harder under the new ones, because now the model watches you do them over 24 months:
Tony also noted that some corners of lending were positioned to use the new score even before the Fannie and Freddie switch, VA lending and certain bank portfolio programs among them, subject to each lender's systems catching up; treat that as a question to ask rather than a promise. Meanwhile the mechanics of today's mortgage pull, the tri-merge report and the middle score, still govern your file until the rollout lands, and we walk through all of it in how lenders look at your credit report. Where the models agree completely is on pricing: your score still sets your rate tier, as we showed in how credit score affects your mortgage rate.
The question we cannot answer in an article is which of these regimes your specific file prices best under, and whether your next six months are better spent on paydown, on rent reporting, or on simply applying. That is your-numbers work, and it is exactly what a free Roadmap call is for: about 20 minutes, and you leave with your qualification range and a sequence that fits the file you actually have, under the rules that actually apply when you buy.
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Build my Roadmap →VantageScore 4.0 and FICO 10T, the two models the Federal Housing Finance Agency validated in October 2022 for the conventional conforming market. In July 2025 the FHFA directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to implement them. The newer models evaluate 24 months of trended credit data and can incorporate rent, utility, and phone payments where those are reported to the bureaus, unlike the classic FICO model built in the late 1980s.
Increasingly, yes. VantageScore 4.0 scores rent history when it appears in your credit file, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have separately pushed to consider on-time rent in their own evaluations. The catch is coverage: most rent is still never reported to the bureaus. If you rent and your file is thin, ask your property manager or a rent-reporting service about getting your payment history reported, because two years of on-time rent is strong evidence in your favor.
Data that shows your behavior over time rather than at one moment. A point-in-time model sees today's balances and marks; a trended model like VantageScore 4.0 evaluates roughly 24 months of history, so it can tell whether you are improving, sliding, or steady. For buyers recovering from a rough patch, that means the clean months since actually count, instead of the old snapshot where only the damage was visible.
As of this episode's air date, 9/1/2025, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been directed to implement it with immediate effect but had not announced a date, and Tony Hutchinson of VantageScore told us both enterprises were working hard to get there, guessing before the end of 2025. Some channels, such as VA lending and certain bank portfolio programs, were positioned to use it sooner, depending on lender systems. Ask your lender what score model your file will actually be run on.
It depends on your file, and nobody should promise you a number. Buyers trending upward after old trouble, and thin-file buyers with reportable rent, utility, and phone history, are the likeliest to benefit, since the new models score about 33 million people the classic model cannot. Steady files may see little change, and a file trending downward will show that too. The fundamentals, on-time payments and moderate utilization, help under every model.