Homebuyers are paying more for mortgage credit checks.

Homebuyers are seeing sharply higher fees for mortgage credit checks due to rising wholesale prices for scores and reports, a tri-merge requirement that limits lender choice, and those higher vendor costs being passed through at closing.

What’s driving the higher fees?

• FICO royalty hikes. FICO increased its wholesale royalty for mortgage scores to $4.95$per score for 2025, after prior increases, pushing up the base cost of each score used in a mortgage file. Because a tri-merge uses three scores, that change multiplies across each borrower.

• Tri-merge reports as de facto standard. To sell loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, most lenders must obtain a tri-merge credit report from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, which means they can’t shop a cheaper single-bureau option for conforming loans. This concentrates pricing power in a small set of vendors and their resellers.

• Large percentage run-up in a few years. Industry and CFPB data show tri-merge hard-pull costs roughly doubling in two years for some lenders (for example, from about $50$to $110$, and from under $30$ to over $60$). Trade groups report credit costs per closed loan rising from about $50$ in 2022 to $150$–$200$ by 2024, and much higher ($510$–$725$) when you allocate the cost of reports on applications that never close.

• Vendor and reseller markups. The FICO royalty is only one input; credit bureaus and resellers layer on their own fees, and some lenders report overall increases of 40%–400% versus a few years ago, far outpacing inflation.

How much more are buyers actually paying?

• A basic tri-merge report for a single borrower that might have been about $33.50$ a year ago is cited at $47.05$ in 2026 in one example, a roughly 40% increase, and that’s on the low end.​

• Because lenders typically pull credit at application and again before closing, one individual may generate close to $94$ in credit-report fees, and a couple nearly $188$, depending on the lender’s pricing.​

• Some lenders still absorb part or all of these costs for loans that don’t close, but several have signaled they may need to start charging borrowers more directly as 2025–2026 price increases take effect.​

Why regulators and trade groups care

• The CFPB and FHFA have flagged rising credit-report and score costs as a contributor to higher closing costs, which rose about 36% between 2021 and 2023 on home purchase loans.

• CFPB’s “junk fee” mortgage closing inquiry explicitly calls out rising credit-report and credit-score charges and notes their outsized impact on smaller-balance, lower-income, and first-time borrowers because these fees are mostly fixed per loan.

• The Mortgage Bankers Association and other groups have warned FHFA that, if unaddressed, mortgage credit-report costs could be 40%–50% higher by 2026, squeezing lender margins or being passed on to consumers.

What might change next

• FHFA has explored moving away from mandatory tri-merge toward alternatives such as fewer bureaus or updated score models (FICO 10T and VantageScore 4.0), which could eventually alter pricing dynamics, though the agency has not committed to a specific change.

• The credit bureaus’ trade association defends tri-merge as important for data accuracy and investor confidence, signaling industry resistance to changes that would cut volume or pricing.​

• The CFPB’s ongoing inquiry into closing-cost “junk fees” means additional scrutiny of how much of these rising wholesale costs lenders are passing through and how transparent those charges are to borrowers.