Is My Credit Score and My Husband's the Same?

Although you and your husband might merge all of your finances when you get married, one thing you cannot merge is your credit history. Because credit reports are tied to an individual's social security number, you and your husband will always have separate credit reports and, therefore, separate credit scores.

Separate Credit Reports

Your credit score is based on the information within your credit report and your husband's score is based on his credit report. Although you might have some joint accounts, if either of you had credit history before marriage or have any separate credit accounts, your credit reports will not contain exactly the same information. If you have similar habits for managing credit, you can expect that your scores may be similar, but they are not guaranteed to be the same.

Considerations

If one of you has excellent credit and the other has a poor credit, this could impact your ability to obtain joint credit. This is because lenders pull the credit reports for both applicants and consider both scores when extending an offer for joint credit. For example, although you might have excellent credit and be able to qualify for the lowest tier of interest rates on a mortgage, if your husband has poor credit, this will increase your offered interest rate or cause your application to be rejected entirely. The only way to get around this would be if you applied for the mortgage alone so only your credit counts. However, this would also mean that only your income would count, so it will likely decrease the maximum amount you could qualify to borrow.

Strategy

If one of you has much better credit than the other, you can use this to work together to boost the poor credit score. One method is to add the spouse with poor credit as an authorized user on a credit card account of the spouse with good credit. The entire credit history on that credit card account will show up on the authorized user's credit report. If the account history is good, with few missed payments and a low balance on the card, this can help boost the authorized user's credit score.

Unusual Exception

One particular situation will lead to a husband and wife to always having identical credit scores. If neither of the married couple had any credit accounts prior to marriage and they always applied for, and managed all credit jointly. In this situation, their credit reports will contain exactly the same data, therefore, they will have the same credit score.