Loading…
Utilization is worked out on the balance your lender reports, and that snapshot is cut on your statement date — not after you pay the bill. Charge $4,000 to a $5,000 card, clear it in full every single month, and the bureaus can still see 80%. Put your cards in below and you get the overall figure, the figure for each card, the band each one lands in, and the exact payment that drops you a band.
Use the balance printed on the statement, not today’s balance — the statement figure is the one your lender sends on. A row with no limit stays out of the totals.
38% used — the 30–49% band · $5,600.00 of room left · pay $790.00 on this one to report 10–29%
92% used — the 75% or more band · $400.00 of room left · pay $900.00 on this one to report 50–74%
10% used — the 10–29% band · $18,000.00 of room left · pay $200.00 on this one to report 1–9%
29%
Overall — $10,000 reported against $34,000 of limits, the 10–29% band
$10,000
Reported balances
$34,000
Total limits
$24,000
Room left
3
Accounts counted
Under the 30% line every article quotes. That line is a rule of thumb from a US FICO model, not a published Canadian threshold.
$140.00
to get under 30% — pays down to 29%
$6,940.00
to get under 10% — pays down to 9%
$10,000.00
to report nothing owing
Those payments have to be made and posted before your statement date to change what gets reported. Paying the same money after the statement is cut still clears the debt and still avoids interest — it just does nothing to this month’s figure.
An estimate of the ratio a bureau would work out from these numbers — not a score, and not advice from anyone licensed to give it. Nobody outside Equifax and TransUnion knows how heavily utilisation weighs; the “30% of your score” figure describes a US FICO model and is quoted secondhand. Percentages here are whole numbers, and any balance at all is shown as at least 1% — $40 on a $10,000 card is 0.4%, which is not nothing but is not the 1% printed either. Reported figures also lag: a payment made today can take a full statement cycle, up to a month or so, to appear.
The date that matters is the statement date, not the due date
Your lender sends one balance to the bureaus, usually within a few days of the statement being cut. It is what you owed when the cycle closed — not what is left after you pay it. Someone who charges $4,000 to a $5,000 card and pays it in full every single month, never touching a cent of interest, reports 80% utilisation twelve months a year. Move the payment a few days earlier, to just before the statement date, and the same money reports as a fraction of that. The statement date is printed on the statement; the due date is roughly three weeks after it, and it is the wrong deadline for this particular job.
The overall figure is hiding Mastercard
Altogether you are at 29%, which reads as comfortable. Mastercard on its own is at 92% — $4,600.00 of a $5,000.00 limit. Your report lists that card on its own line, balance and limit; the overall figure is worked out from those lines rather than printed as one of them. A single card near its limit is the sort of thing a lender can look at directly rather than through an average. Paying $900.00 off that one card before its statement date reports it at 50–74%.
What closing Line of credit would do to the figure
Clearing Line of credit and leaving the account open takes the overall figure to 24%. Close it and the same balances report 57% — its $20,000 limit leaves with it, and the limit was doing the work in the denominator. That is the arithmetic people get caught by after a payoff: the debt goes down and the ratio goes up. Whether the account is worth keeping is a separate question — an annual fee, or a card you would rather not have open, are both reasons this sum knows nothing about.
Every figure here is arithmetic on the numbers you typed, worked out in your browser — nothing is uploaded, saved or sent anywhere, and closing the tab is the whole of the cleanup. It is not a credit score and not financial advice; for the balances and limits your lenders have actually reported, and for what any of it is doing to your file, the source is Equifax Canada or TransUnion Canada.
Fill in the fields. There is nothing to upload because there is nothing to send — the numbers you enter never leave this tab.
The arithmetic runs in your browser, on your own device, and the answer updates with every keystroke. Nothing is sent anywhere — so there is no record of what you earn, what you owe, or what you are thinking of buying.
One press puts it on your clipboard, ready to paste where you need it. There is no file to download — the result is text, not a document. Nothing is remembered — reload and the fields go back to their defaults, so copy anything you want to keep.