Equifax Statement on FICO® 2X Price Increase for 2026 and Mortgage Direct Licens ...

As a Nationwide Consumer Reporting Agency, Equifax plays an essential role in the financial lives of U.S. consumers. We are proud to support the American Dream of home ownership, and we take our responsibility in the mortgage process very seriously. A safe, sound, and competitive mortgage market is in the best interest of the consumers we serve and is an important part of helping them to live their financial best.

FICO's doubling of their FICO score pricing for mortgage from $4.95 in 2025 to $10.00 in 2026 and the announcement of their Mortgage Direct License Program is another example of FICO flexing its monopoly pricing power. While the announcement has been positioned as a cost savings, it will actually end up costing consumers and the mortgage industry much more - continuing FICO's established pattern of aggressive pricing actions from their historical sole source position in the Mortgage space. FICO has more than doubled its previously disclosed pricing for 2026 with a CAGR of 250% over the past 4 years, with the costs and regulatory liabilities to manage and deliver scores now residing with resellers and lenders. FICO is further penalizing consumers by forcing them to bear the brunt of significant additional costs at closing.

Equifax will continue to obtain, process, validate and secure the data that makes credit scores possible with the expertise gained over decades of this highly-regulated work. We will also continue to maintain a robust process to meet all regulatory and legal obligations. We do this across thousands of data furnishers, supporting updates and changes on a daily basis with a technology, data, and security infrastructure built on our industry's largest cloud transformation and a multi-year, more than $3B investment. In 2024 alone we maintained information on more than 3.5 billion tradelines with information for more than 245 million consumers.

Ultimately, FICO's aggressive announcement further amplifies the need for a competitive scoring market. We applaud the FHFA's recent decision to welcome VantageScore into the mortgage scoring process as a critical step to ensuring a healthy mortgage ecosystem. We are actively working with our customers to accelerate their adoption of VantageScore and have already seen broad adoption across multiple industries, including large lenders who are maintaining full, VantageScore-based environments. We believe that with this new FICO pricing program, adoption of VantageScore will continue to increase, creating real cost savings for customers and consumers.