Canadian credit reporting runs through two national bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion, both scoring consumers on a 300 to 900 scale. They do not use the same proprietary model, so the same borrower can show meaningfully different scores at each bureau — a gap of twenty to fifty points is common and not, by itself, a red flag. Equifax bands its scores roughly as good from 660–724, very good from 725–759, and excellent above 760; lenders and insurers set their own internal cut-offs against these bands rather than following a single national standard, which is why a client's score can be treated as investment-grade at a monoline and merely acceptable at a big bank on the same file.
Every account on a credit report carries a rating code combining a letter and a number. The letter identifies the account type: R for revolving credit (credit cards, most lines of credit), I for installment credit (car loans, personal loans with a fixed term), M for mortgage. The number describes payment behaviour, from 0 (too new to rate or current with no history yet) through 1 (paid within 30 days of due date, essentially on time) up to 9 (bad debt, placed for collection or written off). An R1 trade line is the best outcome a revolving account can show; an R3 means payments have run 60–89 days late at some point — a materially different signal even though both start with the same letter.
The three-digit score compresses a lot of information, and underwriters routinely open the full report rather than stopping at the number. They look at payment history across every trade line, not just the summary; credit utilization, meaning how much of each revolving limit is actually drawn; the length and mix of credit history; the volume of recent inquiries; and any public record items such as a past bankruptcy, consumer proposal, judgment or collection. A single 90-day-late notation from three years ago on an otherwise spotless report reads very differently from the same notation appearing twice in the last twelve months, and only reading past the score surfaces that distinction.
A discharged bankruptcy or completed consumer proposal does not permanently close the door to a mortgage, but it does move the file into a different lender category with its own waiting periods and re-established-credit requirements — commonly two years of clean re-established credit post-discharge for stronger A-lender consideration, with wider tolerance available through B and alternative lenders sooner. The specifics vary by insurer and lender and change over time, so treat this as a category to research on the live file rather than a number to memorize and repeat as fixed policy.
Multiple mortgage-related inquiries within a short window are generally treated by scoring models as rate shopping and bundled together rather than penalized individually — but the exact window and whether it applies varies by which scoring model is in use, and it is not a guarantee across every lender and every bureau pull in Canada the way it is more uniformly promised in the United States. The safer discipline is the same regardless: pull credit once with intention, not repeatedly and speculatively across multiple lenders before a strategy is set.
A client's Equifax score is 41 points lower than their TransUnion score, with no obvious errors on either report. What does this most likely mean?
Equifax and TransUnion run different scoring models on overlapping but not identical data, so a moderate gap between the two is ordinary and does not, on its own, indicate an error or anything adverse about the borrower. Neither bureau is inherently more accurate for mortgage purposes; lenders may prefer one or pull both depending on their own policy. Assuming fraud or an error from a gap this size would send the file down an unnecessary and unproductive path.
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