It is normal to have differences in scores.

First, there are three Credit Reporting Agencies. These are for-profit businesses and it costs a creditor money to subscribe. There is no law that says a creditor has to subscribe to a CRA, much less subscribe to all three. Larger creditors probably will, but smaller places will try to save money. Therefore, the three CRAs have different sets of subscribers reporting to them, so they have different sets of data. Even where creditors subscribe to all the CRAs, they might transmit their updates on different schedules, or the CRAs might post their updates on different schedules. If you start with different history data, you will end up with a difference in score. If you are buying a score from a third party, they do not have access to the CRA’s actual formula, so, unless they are buying it from the CRA for you, they are using their own formula to approximate the CRA’s score. Don’t be surprised if you buy one from a third party, and then buy one from the CRA and they’re different. Remember, if the CRA told anybody what the formula was, nobody would have to come to then to see their score and a source of revenue would be lost.

Second, there is no such thing as one FICO score. There are many. Fair Isaac Corporation develops scoring formulas for business decision making on contract. That means that each of the CRAs has paid to have their own formulas developed and they aren’t going to let anybody else see them. SO, if you run data through different formulas, you can expect different scores to come out.

Third, I did say "formulas" (plural). The purpose of this exercise is not to create a number for the sake of having a number, but to predict reliable customer payments. A formula that predicts whether someone is a good customer for a three-year car loan is not necessarily going to predict a good customer for a thirty-year home mortgage and is not necessarily going to predict a good customer for a month-to-month revolving credit card and is not necessarily going to predict a good customer for an insurance company. So, the CRAs have developed multiple formulas to meet the differing needs of different customers. Two creditors requesting the same score from the same CRA at the same time might get different scores if they specified different scoring options. Which one do you see when you buy one? Probably the one for credit card issuers, but it’s really up to the CRA which one to send you.

And now for the surprise. Some creditors don’t use the CRAs scores at all. They read the full report. Others get the reports over a computer-to-computer link and score them themselves rather than pay the extra charge for the CRA score. I worked for such a company in the information systems department. We had hired our own in-house mathematician to develop a formula to predict who would be a good customer for our company.

Don’t blame Equifax if they are not reporting your accounts. It’s not their fault, it’s the fault of your creditors for not reporting your accounts to Equifax.

As far as the score goes; Equifax uses a true FICO score, the other two do not.