Or they'll use your "high balance" as a proxy for the credit limit. Lots of anecdotes on myfico's forums.

I thought this issue was slowly going away as Chase was one of the major issuers that started to report CLs last year. Which major banks still do this?

I'm not sure, since it hasn't really affected me enough to track it down. What I'd heard is that more of the recent Chase products actually report the CL so, as a consequence, it's less of an issue for many people. But I hadn't heard that the practice itself was going away.

There ARE recent threads about it at myfico. If you take the time to research it, I'd be interested to know what you find out about recent practices.

Did a quick search - looks like BoA is the last major issuer to not report the CL. They do report the CL on their world mc though.

That practice stopped awhile ago. Nearly all Visa Signature cards report credit limits.

800 FICO means you aren't using your credit to your best advantage. I thought like you as well until I realized that people with 740+ FICO got same mortgage rates as I. And despite substantially lower FICO scores, perversely they were getting far more value from lower credit score - because they were churning and getting fat award bonuses. Now my FICO is around 750 and utilization is around 5-7% - and I now have a million miles/points that provide tens of thousands of value that I was otherwise not taking advantage of.

Frankly, 800 FICO means you are a bit of a sap...

Credit Score Zealots Pursue Fool’s Errand

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...-over-800.html

From what I've seen browsing the annual reports and other financial filings of mortgage issuers is that the credit score ranges are lumped together. So 700-800 might be a bucket for example. I'm not sure how large the bundlings are, but I would agree with the general comments in this thread that the benefit after some point is very marginal. If there's any benefit, it's in the person's satisfaction of their own credit scores at that point.

do the credit card companies report the balance of our score on any given day or what is left over after you pay the statement? if it is the former, if one were to pay off an entire balance every month, the credit card may still report a balance? how can they tell if you pay off the entire balance every month?

Most report whatever is showing as the balance on the statement. A few report whatever your balance is on the first of the month.

So, unless you time your payment to hit before the statement closes, no one will know what you pay off vs. carry over.

(Although some agencies also show payment amount, minimum payment due, etc. But what factors into utilization is usually the statement balance.)