What Credit Score You Need to Refinance, by Loan Type

Search for the credit score to refinance and you get one number back: 620. It’s a bad answer, because it collapses three separate things into one. There is the number the loan program itself requires, the number the individual lender has bolted on top of it, and the number that actually buys you a rate worth paying closing costs for. On an FHA Streamline those three numbers are, in order: none, 640, and none again. Getting them confused is how people talk themselves out of a refinance they’d have qualified for, or walk into one at a rate that never made sense.

Below is what each program requires, what lenders in practice want, what the score costs in dollars, and (more usefully) the underwriting rules that turn down more files than credit does.

The credit score to refinance, program by program

The program floor is set by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, VA, or USDA. The lender minimum is an overlay: the lender’s own stricter rule, layered on top because they’re the ones holding the risk if the loan goes bad early. Overlays are not law. They vary lender to lender, which means a decline is shoppable in a way a program rule is not.

Refinance type	Program floor	What lenders typically want
Conventional rate-and-term	620	620, many 640
Conventional cash-out	620; 640 if manually underwritten	620–680
FHA (standard)	580	580–620
FHA Streamline	No credit score verification	640 typical, some 580–620
VA IRRRL	No VA minimum	580–620
VA cash-out	No VA minimum	620, some at 580
USDA Streamlined Assist	No USDA minimum	~640
Jumbo	Non-agency, no floor	700+

Two rows in that table deserve more than a row. FHA does not require credit score verification on a Streamline refinance at all: the 640 you were quoted belongs to the lender in front of you, not to the program, and some lenders will go lower or skip the credit qualification entirely. If one shop tells you your score kills the deal, that is a statement about that shop.

The second is the VA IRRRL, where your score doesn’t price the loan. A 580 borrower and a 740 borrower walking into the same lender on the same morning get the same rate, because IRRRL pricing comes off market conditions and the lender’s margin rather than borrower risk tiers. Every “raise your score before you refinance” article on the internet is wrong about this one product.

What the score is actually worth in rate

myFICO’s May 2026 data, run on a $378,384 loan over 30 years, gives the refinance spread by tier:

FICO	Rate-and-term APR	Cash-out APR
760–850	6.83%	7.08%
700–759	7.08%	:
620–639	7.49%	7.74%

Two things fall out of that. The top-to-bottom spread is the same 66 basis points whether you’re taking cash out or not, but the cash-out column sits 25 basis points above the rate-and-term column at both ends (7.08% against 6.83% at the top, 7.74% against 7.49% at the bottom). Pulling equity costs you a quarter point regardless of how good your credit is. That’s a pricing decision about the transaction, not about you.

On the equivalent purchase table, where myFICO publishes the full tiering, the gap between the 760–850 tier at $2,442 a month and the 620–639 tier at $2,610 works out to $168 a month and $60,447 in total interest over the life of the loan.

One piece of common advice worth discarding: the belief that pricing flattens out at 740. Fannie and Freddie restructured their loan-level price adjustment buckets in May 2023, and the top tier now sits at 780 and above, with 740–759 and 760–779 as separate rungs beneath it. If you’re at 745 and assuming you’ve maxed out, there are two more tiers above you. Our breakdown of the current score tiers walks through where each cliff sits.

These price adjustments apply to conventional loans only, not FHA, VA, or USDA. It’s why a 640 borrower is sometimes better off on an FHA refinance than a conventional one purely on pricing, even carrying mortgage insurance.

The score they pull is not the score you’re looking at

The free score in your banking app is almost certainly FICO 8 or VantageScore. Mortgage lenders don’t use either. They pull FICO 2 from Experian, FICO 4 from TransUnion, and FICO 5 from Equifax: older model versions that weight things differently and routinely return a different number, sometimes by twenty or thirty points in either direction.

Then they take the middle of the three. Not the average, not the best: the median. And with a co-borrower, they use the lower of the two middle scores, which means a spouse with one old collection sets the price on the entire loan. Where the income qualifies without them, applying solo is a legitimate strategy rather than a trick.

If you want to model this properly, myFICO launched a mortgage-specific score simulator on 24 February 2026 that runs “what if I pay this card down” scenarios against FICO 2, 4, and 5 rather than FICO 8. It sits behind a paid subscription, but it’s the only consumer tool that simulates the versions lenders actually buy.

The rules that block more files than the score does

Here is the part most articles skip. Plenty of refinances die with a 720 attached to them, for reasons that have nothing to do with credit.

Seasoning. For a conventional cash-out, at least one borrower must have been on title for six months before the loan disburses, with narrow exceptions for inheritance, legal awards, delayed financing, and transfers in and out of an LLC or trust. Separately, the existing first mortgage must be at least twelve months old, measured note date to note date. Buy in March, and no score gets you a cash-out in June.

Reserves triggered by DTI. On a cash-out run through Desktop Underwriter, a debt-to-income ratio above 45% requires six months of reserves. Six months of full mortgage payments, in an account, documented. This is the rule that most often surprises people who were told they’d been approved.

LTV. Conventional cash-out caps at 80% of value. Above 80% on a rate-and-term refinance you’re into mortgage insurance, which carries its own credit minimums independent of the loan program’s. And on manually underwritten conventional cash-out files, the required score itself moves with LTV rather than sitting at a fixed floor.

If you’re currently under the line

There’s a reason this question is being asked so much in 2026. Student loan delinquencies returned to credit reports in early 2025, and the delinquency rate went from under 1% to nearly 8% in a single quarter, with roughly six million borrowers 90 days or more past due between January and March of that year. The national average FICO fell to 714: the first annual decline since 2013. A drop of that size is exactly what moves someone from 680 to 620, which is the difference between a refinance worth doing and one that isn’t.

Options that exist below the conventional threshold:

• FHA cash-out, which allows scores down to 500 at the program level with 580 needed for full access, though most lenders want 600–620 and a twelve-month seasoning applies.
• Non-QM products (bank statement and asset-based loans) which start around 600 in exchange for a lower maximum LTV. Useful mainly for self-employed borrowers; we cover that route in hidden refi rates for the self-employed.
• RefiNow and Refi Possible, Fannie and Freddie’s matching programs for lower-income borrowers, which permit DTI up to 65%, as little as 3% equity, and include a $500 appraisal credit.

If none of those fit yet, refinancing when credit isn’t perfect covers the sequencing, and our credit hacks piece covers what moves a mortgage score fastest.

Before you apply

• Pull all three mortgage-version scores, not the free FICO 8, and note the middle one
• Find your current note date and confirm it’s more than twelve months old if you want cash out
• Estimate your LTV before ordering an appraisal, not after
• If your DTI is near 45%, count your reserves in months of full payment
• Get quotes from at least three lenders, and treat any score-based decline as an overlay until they show you otherwise

Timing is its own variable. The 30-year fixed reached 6.78% in late August 2026, a three-week high, and the MBA’s refinance index sat 17% below where it was a year earlier. In a market that thin, the spread between lenders on the same file widens: which makes shopping worth more than the twenty points you might squeeze out of a score. Locking well matters more than most people expect.