Your FHA Loan Gets Two New Credit Scores on January 1. Running All Three Can Only Hurt You.

If you’re buying with an FHA loan next year, the number that decides your down payment is about to change.

From January 1, 2027, FHA will accept two more credit scoring models: VantageScore 4.0 and FICO Score 10T. Classic FICO, the model FHA has run for decades, stays on the menu. VantageScore 4.0 counts on-time rent when a reporting service feeds it to the bureaus. Classic FICO ignores rent completely.

If you rent and you pay on time, that is worth real money.

Here’s the catch, and it is a real one. If your lender submits more than one model, every model has to come back Accept.

FHA put the date out on September 10 in FHA INFO 2026-21, with a preparedness guide for lenders. It covers case numbers assigned on or after January 1, 2027, on Title II forward mortgages, the ordinary purchase and refinance program, scored through FHA’s TOTAL Mortgage Scorecard. FHA is running virtual office hours for lenders across two full weeks, November 16 to 20 and January 11 to 15, which tells you something about how ready the industry is.

Two things FHA deliberately left alone. It still wants a tri-merged credit report, all three bureaus. And it keeps the same minimum decision credit score thresholds of 500, 580 and 620.

The door moved. The doorframe did not.

Why this one matters more than the last one

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac already opened VantageScore 4.0 to every lender, and we wrote about what that does for renters trying to buy. FHA is the bigger deal. FHA is where people go when the credit file is thin and the down payment is small.

FHA’s score bands are cliffs, not slopes. At 580 or above you get maximum financing, 96.5% of the value, so 3.5% down. Between 500 and 579 you are capped at 90%, so 10% down. On a $300,000 house that is $10,500 against $30,000.

Nineteen thousand five hundred dollars, decided by which side of one number you land on.

Two years of on-time rent, visible to the model instead of invisible to it, can be exactly that many points for a thin file.

The part your loan officer may not have read yet

FHA’s guidance says that when a lender submits multiple credit-score models to the TOTAL Scorecard, every model submitted must get an Accept for the transaction to get an Accept. All borrowers on the loan have to be run through the same model or models, too.

Translation: more models does not buy you more chances to pass. It gives the scorecard more chances to say no.

Nobody hands out a prize for pulling all three.

Do this now, if you’re buying in 2027

Get your rent into your credit file. VantageScore 4.0 only sees rent that a rental reporting service has passed to the bureaus, and signing a lease does nothing by itself. Start now and you have a year of history sitting there when it counts. Start in January and the model has nothing to look at.

Ask your loan officer one question before they pull your credit: which model are you submitting, and are you submitting more than one? If the answer is “all of them,” ask them to pick one.

And if you’re closing this fall, you don’t need to do anything. Case numbers assigned in 2026 run on Classic FICO. This is a 2027 problem.

The fine print

FHA is shipping an updated TOTAL Developer’s Guide, Release 5.0, and refreshed FAQs alongside the change. The tri-merge requirement stays for now, though federal officials are separately looking at whether lenders could stop pulling all three reports. Nothing has changed there yet, so plan around three.

Freddie Mac put the 30-year fixed average at 6.76% for the week of September 10, 2026, and the 15-year at 6.09%. Run your own numbers on the mortgage calculator, and start at our mortgages hub if you want the rest of this year’s rules.

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