Credit scoring in Germany vs the US: SCHUFA and FICO explained

One number decides whether you get the apartment, the car loan and the credit card. The trouble is that the number means something different on each side of the Atlantic. A FICO score is a three-digit product computed by a private company from files held by three competing agencies, and it is designed to be watched and improved. A SCHUFA score is a percentage that says how likely you are to pay, and it is one input into a decision your bank makes with its own model.

Move between the two systems and old habits misfire. Americans in Germany keep looking for a score to optimise that does not exist in that form. Germans in the US assume their clean payment history speaks for itself and are surprised that nobody can see it.

Two scales, two different jobs

The FICO score runs from 300 to 850, higher is better, and the median American sits somewhere around 715. It is not the only score in the country: VantageScore is a competing model on the same 300 to 850 scale, and FICO itself sells several versions plus industry-specific scores for auto lending and credit cards. Lenders choose which one they buy, which is why two honest answers to "what is my score" can differ by thirty points.

The German score is a percentage. It expresses the statistical probability that you will meet your obligations, so 98% is excellent and 85% is not, and SCHUFA publishes different versions of it depending on the question being asked. A bank assessing a mortgage, an instalment loan or a current account may see a different value from the same data. On top of that, most German lenders combine the SCHUFA information with their own internal scoring and with the income and account data you hand them directly, so the final decision was never a single number.

What a FICO score is made of is public. Payment history carries 35% of the weight, the amounts you owe 30%, the length of your credit history 15%, new credit 10% and the mix of credit types the last 10%.

What each agency is allowed to know

FICO holds no data of its own. It is a scoring model applied to files that Equifax, Experian and TransUnion maintain, which is why your three US reports can contain three different sets of information and three different scores. The bureaus collect account balances, credit limits, payment histories, collection accounts, public records such as bankruptcies, and records of who has asked to see your file.

SCHUFA works differently in one important respect: it is a register of contracts and payment behaviour reported by its members, which include banks, savings banks, telecom providers, mail-order retailers and energy suppliers. It does not receive your income, your assets, your savings balance or your nationality. Its data is narrower than most people assume in one direction and wider in another: a mobile phone contract and a mail-order account appear in it, while a salary of 90,000 a year is invisible.

There is also a difference in how many files exist. The US has three nationwide agencies that compete, so a dispute has to be filed up to three times. Germany has one dominant agency with smaller competitors such as Creditreform Boniversum, CRIF Bürgel and infoscore, so there is usually one file that matters.

Inquiries, defaults and how long they last

The two systems treat curiosity very differently. In the US, a lender's request for your file is either a soft inquiry, which nobody but you sees, or a hard inquiry, which is recorded, shaves a few points and disappears after two years. Rate shopping for a mortgage or a car loan inside a 45-day window is counted once, and checking your own score never counts at all.

In Germany, a request for conditions is recorded and visible, but it is not a payment default and does not carry the weight of one. A completed application that turns into a contract is stored as an account. What actually damages a German file is a negative entry: an unpaid debt that has been formally pursued. That is the entry banks care about, and paying it does not erase it immediately. A settled entry stays for three years from the date it is cleared, a rule the Federal Court of Justice confirmed in December 2025 when it held that settling a debt does not trigger immediate deletion.

Adverse information therefore has a defined lifespan, and the two countries disagree about how long it should be.