Your credit score moves your rate through loan-level price adjustments (LLPAs), the pricing add-ons Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac charge by credit tier and loan-to-value. Those adjustments get paid either as points up front or baked into a slightly higher rate. The size of a jump depends on where you sit on the grid: - Near the top, moving up one tier is small, often a difference you would barely notice in the rate. - Through the middle tiers, the gaps widen. The spread between a fair score and a strong one (think 680 versus 740) can be a meaningful fraction of a percent in rate on a conventional loan. - In the lowest conventional tiers (around 620 to 640), the premium gets large, sometimes enough to push a borrower out of conventional and into FHA, where pricing treats lower scores more gently. Two things worth knowing. The top of the grid used to sit at 740, but current pricing keeps rewarding scores well past that, so pushing into the high 700s and 800s has real value. And FHA and VA carry no agency LLPAs, but individual lenders add their own overlays to keep their loan pools strong, so roughly 680-plus still tends to earn the best FHA and VA pricing. The grid changes over time and your quote depends on dozens of variables, so confirm current pricing rather than counting on any single figure. We can walk through your real numbers on the free Roadmap conversation.