Does Being Single Help or Hurt Your Personal Credit Score?

By Dawn Handschuh, Personal Finance Writer Archive

Being single has its perks. You can eat leftovers three nights running and not hear a groan. You won't find the shampoo bottle empty in the shower. And if you feel like reading in bed at midnight, no one will mind. When it comes to your personal credit score, have you ever wondered whether being single confers any added benefits?

You may know that if you're married, a spouse's poorer credit score could affect your ability to obtain credit at favorable rates, if you're applying for joint accounts. Although you'd both still have separate credit scores, any application for joint credit cards or joint loans would trigger credit checks on both of you. If your spouse didn't have a good credit score, it could influence the lender's decision to approve your loan or, if it's approved, affect how much interest you'll pay.

If you're single, though, it all rides on you. The factors that go into calculating credit scores cannot include your marital status (or race, ethnicity, religion, national origin or sex, for that matter) under the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA).

Under ECOA, credit-scoring formulas cannot use your marital status as a factor in determining your personal credit scores. Similarly, creditors (anyone involved in granting credit, from banks and credit card companies to real estate brokers who arrange financing) can't consider your marital status when deciding whether to extend credit to you — in fact, they can't even ask if you're widowed or divorced.

In those rare instances when creditors are allowed to ask about marital status (for instance, when you're applying for a joint account or a loan that's secured by property), they can only use the following terms: "married," "unmarried," or "separated."

By itself, being single won't boost your personal credit score. But if you tend to have better-than-average scores, you'll benefit by not having a bad-credit spouse hike up interest rates on any joint loans. But if your credit history is dotted with late payments, you may pay a greater penalty than if you were married to someone whose higher score could help you qualify for better deals.